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PRESENTED BY 






THE LITTLE MANX NATION 




Manx Nation 



BY 



HALL CAINE 
ii 

AUTHOR OF 
'THE BONDMAN," " THE DEEMSTER" ETC. 



NEW YORK 
UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY 

SUCCESSORS TO 

JOHN \V. LOVELL COMPANY 

142 TO 150 WORTH STREET 



2 












To the 

*Rjverend T. 8. 'Brown, M.vf. ' 

You see -what I send you — my lectures at the T{oyal Institution in the 
Spring. In making a little book of them I have thought it best to leave 
them as they were delivered, -with all the colloquialisms that are natural 
to spoken words jrankly exposed to cold print. This does not help 
them to any particular distinction as literature, but perhaps it lends 
them an ease end familiarity which may partly atone to you and to all 
good souls Jot their plentiful lack of dignity. I have said so often that 
I am not an historian, that I ought to add that whatever history lies 
hidden here belongs to Train, our only accredited chronicler, and, even 
at the risk of bowing too low, I must needs protest, in our north-country 
homespun, that he shall have the pudding if he will also take the 
pudding-bag. You know what I mean. sAt some points our history — 
especially our early history — m still so vague, so dubious, so full of 
mystery. It is all the fault of little oftfannanan, our ancient cslfanx 
magician, who enshrouded our is/and in mist. Or should I say it is to 
his credit, for has he not left us through all time some shadowy figures 
to fght about, like " rael, thrtte, regular " (^Manxmen ? *As for tie 
stories, the '■'■yarns'''' that lie like flies — like blue-bottles, like bees, I trust 
not like wasps — in the amber of the history, yu will see that they are 
mainly my own. On second thought it occurs to me that maybe they are 
mainly yours. Let us say that they are both yours and mine, or perhaps, 
if the world finds anything good in them, any humour, any pathos, any 
racy touches of our rugged people, you will permit me to determine their 
ownership in the way of this paraphrase of Qcleridge's doggei el version 
of the two Latin hexameters — 

" They'' re mine and they are likewise yours, 
''Hut an if that will not do, 
Let them be mine, good friend ! for I 
cAm the poorer of the two." 

Hawthorns, Keswick, 
June 1891. 



CONTENTS 

THE STORY OF THE MANX KINGS. 

Islanders— Our Island— The Name of our Island— Our History 
—King Orry— The Tynwald— The Lost Saga— The Manx 
Macbeth— The Manx Glo'ster— Scotch and English Dominion 
—The Stanley Dynasty— Iliam Dhoan— The Athol Dynasty 
—Smuggling and Wrecking— The Revestment— Home Rule 
— Orry's Sons PP- *■ S 2 

THE STORY OF THE MANX BISHOPS. 

The Druids— Conversion to Christianity— The Early Bishops 
of Man— Bishops of the Welsh Dynasty— Bishops of the 
Norse Dynasty— Sodor and Man— The Early Bishops of the 
House of Stanley— Tithes in Kind— The Gambling Bishop— 
The Deemsters— The Bishopric Vacant— Bishop Wilson- 
Bishop Wilson's Censures— The Great Corn Famine— The 
Bishop at Court— Stories of Bishop Wilson— Quarrels of 
Church and State— Some Old Ordeals— The Herring Fishery 
—The Fishermen's Service— Some Old Laws— Katherine 
Kinrade— Bishop Wilson's Last Days— The Athol Bishops 

pp. 53-105 

THE STORY OF THE MANX PEOPLE. 

The Manx Language— Manx Names— Manx Imagination- 
Manx Proverbs— Manx Ballads— Manx Carols— Decay of the 
Manx Language— Manx Superstitions— Manx Stories— Manx 
"Characters"— Manx Characteristics— Manx Types— Literary 
Associations— Manx Progress— Conclusion . . pp. 106-159 



THE LITTLE MANX NATION 



THE STORY OF THE MANX KINGS 

There are just two ideas which are associated in 
the popular imagination with the first thought of 
the Isle of Man. The one is that Manxmen have 
three legs, and the other that Manx cats have no 
tails. But whatever the popular conception, or 
misconception, of Man and its people, I shall assume 
that what you ask from me is that simple knowledge 
of simple things which has come to me by the 
accident of my parentage. I must confess to you 
at the outset that I am not much of a hand at 
grave history. Facts and figures I cannot expound 
with authority. But I know the history of the Isle 
of Man, can see it clear, can see it whole, and perhaps 
it will content you if I can show you the soul of it 

A 



2 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

and make it to live before you. In attempting to 
traverse the history I feel like one who carries a 
dark lantern through ten dark centuries. I turn 
the bull's eye on this incident and that, take a peep 
here and there, a white light now, and then a blank 
darkness. Those ten centuries are full of lusty 
fights, victories, vanquishments, quarrels, peace- 
making, shindies big and little, rumpus solemn and 
ridiculous, clouds of dust, regal dust, political dust, 
and religious dust — you know the way of it. But 
beneath it all and behind it all lies the real, true, 
living human heart of Manxland. I want to show 
it to you, if you will allow me to spare the needful 
time from facts and figures. It will get you close 
to Man and its people, and it is not to be found in 
the history books. 

Islanders 

And now, first, we Manxmen are islanders. It 
is not everybody who lives on an island that is an 
islander. You know what I mean. I mean by an 
islander one whose daily life is affected by the 
constant presence of the sea. This is possible 
in a big island if it is far enough away from the 



lect.i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 3 

rest of the world, Iceland, for example, but it is 
inevitable in a little one. The sea is always 
present with Manxmen. Everything they do, 
everything they say, gets the colour and shimmer of 
the sea. The sea goes into their bones, it comes 
out at their skin. Their talk is full of it. They 
buy by it, they sell by it, they quarrel by it, they 
fight by it, they swear by it, they pray by it. Of 
course they are not conscious of this. Only their 
degenerate son, myself to wit, a chiel among them 
takin' notes, knows how the sea exudes from the 
Manxmen. Say you ask if the Governor is at home. 
If he is not, what is the answer ? " He's not on 
the island, sir." You inquire for the best hotel. 
" So-and-so is the best hotel on the island, sir." 
You go to a Manx fair and hear a farmer selling 
a cow. " Aw," says he, " she's a ter'ble gran' 
craythuer for milkin', sir, and for butter maybe 
there isn' the lek of her on the island, sir." Coming 
out of church you listen to the talk of two old 
Manxwomen discussing the preacher. " Well, 
well, ma'am, well, well ! Aw, the voice at him 
and the prayers ! and the beautiful texes ! There 
isn' the lek of him on the island at all, at all ' " 
Always the island, the island, the island, or else 



4 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

the boats, and going out to the herrings. The sea 
is always present. You feel it, you hear it, you 
see it, you can never forget it. It dominates you. 
Manxmen are all sea-folk. 

You will think this implies that Manxmen stick 
close to their island. They do more than that. I 
will tell you a story. Five years ago I went up 
into the mountains to seek an old Manx bard, last of 
a race of whom I shall have something to tell you 
in their turn. All his life he had been a poet. I 
did not gather that he had read any poetry except 
his own. Up to seventy he had been a bachelor. 
Then this good Boaz had lit on his Ruth and 
married, and had many children. I found him in 
a lonely glen, peopled only in story, and then by 
fairies. A bare hill side, not a bush in sight, a 
dead stretch of sea in front, rarely brightened by a 
sail. I had come through a blinding hail-storm. 
The old man was sitting in the chimney nook, a 
little red shawl round his head and knotted under 
his chin. Within this aureole his face was as 
strong as Savonarola's, long and gaunt, and with 
skin stretched over it like parchment. He was no 
hermit, but a farmer, and had lived on that land, 
man and boy, nearly ninety years. He had never 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 5 

been off the island, and had strange notions of the 
rest of the world. Talked of England, London, 
theatres, palaces, king's entertainments, evening 
parties. He saw them all through the mists of 
rumour, and by the light of his Bible. He 
had strange notions, some of them bad shots for 
the truth, some of them startlingly true. I dare 
not tell you what they were. A Royal Institution 
audience would be aghast. They had, as a whole, 
a strong smell of sulphur. But the old bard was 
not merely an islander, he belonged to his land 
more than his land belonged to him. The fishing 
town nearest to his farm was Peel, the great fishing 
centre on the west coast. It was only five miles 
away. I asked how long it was since he had been 
there ? " Fifteen years," he answered. The next 
nearest town was the old capital, on the east 
coast, Castletown, the home of the Governor, of the 
last of the Manx lords, the place of the Castle, 
the Court, the prison, the garrison, the College. 
It was just six miles away. How long was it since 
he had been there ? " Twenty years." The new 
capital, Douglas, the heart of the island, its point of 
touch with the world, was nine miles away. How 
long since he had been in Douglas ? " Sixty years," 



6 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

said the old bard. God bless him, the sweet, dear 
old soul ! Untaught, narrow, self-centred, bred on 
his byre like his bullocks, but keeping his soul alive 
for all that, caring not a ha'porth for the things of 
the world, he was a true Manxman, and I'm proud of 
him. One thing I have to thank him for. But for 
him, and the like of him, we should not be here to-day. 
It is not the cultured Manxman, the Manxman that 
goes to the ends of the earth, that makes the Manx 
nation valuable to study. Our race is what it is 
by virtue of the Manxman who has had no life 
outside Man, and so has kept alive our language, 
our customs, our laws and our patriarchal Con- 
stitution. 

Our Island 

It lies in the middle of the Irish Sea, at about 
equal distances from England, Ireland, Scotland, and 
Wales. Seen from the sea it is a lovely thing to 
look upon. It never fails to bring me a thrill of 
the heart as it comes out of the distance. It lies 
like a bird on the waters. You see it from end to 
end, and from water's edge to topmost peak, often 
enshrouded in mists, a dim ghost on a grey sea ; 



lect.i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 7 

sometimes purple against the setting sun. Then as 
you sail up to it, a rugged rocky coast, grand in its 
beetling heights on the south and west, and broken 
into the sweetest bays everywhere. The water 
clear as crystal and blue as the sky in summer. 
You can see the shingle and the moss through 
many fathoms. Then mountains within, not in 
peaks, but round foreheads. The colour of the 
island is green and gold ; its flavour is that of a 
nut. Both colour and flavour come of the gorse. 
This covers the mountains and moorlands, for, 
except on the north, the island has next to no trees. 
But O, the beauty and delight of it in the Spring ! 
Long, broad stretches glittering under the sun with 
the gold of the gorse, and all the air full of the 
nutty perfume. There is nothing like it in the 
world. Then the glens, such fairy spots, deep, 
solemn, musical with the slumberous waters, clad 
in dark mosses, brightened Dy the red fuchsia. The 
fuchsia is everywhere where the gorse is not. At 
the cottage doors, by the waysides, in the gardens. 
If the gorse should fail the fuchsia might even take 
its place on the mountains. Such is Man, but I 
am partly conscious that it is Man as seen by a 
Manxman. You want a drop of Manx blood in you 



8 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

to see it aright. Then you may go the earth over 
and see grander things a thousand times, things 
more sublime and beautiful, but you will come 
back to Manxland and tramp the Mull Hills in 
May, long hour in, and long hour out, and look 
at the flowering gorse and sniff its flavour, or lie 
by the chasms and listen to the screams of the sea- 
birds, as they whirl and dip and dart and skim over 
the Sugar-loaf Rock, and you'll say after all that 
God has smiled on our little island, and that it is 
the fairest spot in His beautiful world, and, above 
all, that it is ours. 

The Name of our Island 

This is a matter in dispute among philologists 
and I am no authority. Some say that Caesar 
meant the Isle of Man when he spoke of Mona ; 
others say he meant Anglesea. The present name 
is modern. So is Elian Vannin, its Manx equiva- 
lent. In the Icelandic Sagas the island is called 
Mon. Elsewhere it is called Eubonia. One 
historian thinks the island derives its name from 
Mannin — in being an old Celtic word for island, 
therefore Meadhon-in (pronounced Mannin) would 



lect.i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 9 

signify : The middle island. That definition re- 
quires that the Manxman had no hand in naming 
Man. He would never think of describing its 
geographical situation on the sea. Manxmen say 
the island got its name from a mythical personage 
called Mannanan-Beg-Mac-y-Learr, Little Mannanan, 
son of Learr. This man was a sort of Prospero, a 
magician, and the island's first ruler. The story 
goes that if he dreaded an enemy he would en- 
shroud the island in mist, " and that by art magic." 
Happy island, where such faith could ever exist ! 
Modern science knows that mist, and where it 
comes from. 

Our History 

It falls into three periods, first, a period of Celtic 
rule, second of Norse rule, third of English 
dominion. Manx history is the history of sur- 
rounding nations. We have no Sagas of our own 
heroes. The Sagas are all of our conquerors. 
Save for our first three hundred recorded years we 
have never been masters in our own house. The first 
chapter of our history has yet to be written. We 
know we were Celts to begin with, but how we 



io THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

came we have never learnt, whether we walked 
dry-shod from Wales or sailed in boats from Ire- 
land. To find out the facts of our early history 
would be like digging up the island of Prospero. 
Perhaps we had better leave it alone. Ten to one 
we were a gang of political exiles. Perhaps we 
left our country for our country's good. Be it so. 
It was the first and last time that it could be said 
of us. 

King Orry 

Early in the sixth century Man became subject to 
the kings and princes of Wales, who ruled from 
Anglesea. There were twelve of them in succession, 
and the last of them fell in the tenth century. We 
know next to nothing about them but their names. 
Then came the Vikings. The young bloods of Scandi- 
navia had newly established their Norse kingdom in 
Iceland, and were huckstering and sea roving about 
the Baltic and among the British Isles. They had 
been to the Orkneys and Shetlands, and Faroes, 
perhaps to Ireland, certainly to the coast of Cum- 
berland, making Scandinavian settlements every- 
where. So they came to Mon early in the tenth 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION n 

century, led by one Orry, or Gorree. Some say 
this man was nothing but a common sea-rover. 
Others say he was a son of the Danish or Nor- 
wegian monarch. It does not matter much. Orry 
had a better claim to regard than that of the son of 
a great king. He was himself a great man. The 
story of his first landing is a stirring thing. It was 
night, a clear, brilliant, starry night, all the dark 
heavens lit up. Orry's ships were at anchor 
behind him ; and with his men he had touched the 
beach, when down came the Celts to face him, and 
to challenge him. They demanded to know where 
he came from. Then the red-haired sea-warrior 
pointed to the milky way going off towards the 
North. " That is the way of my country," he 
answered. The Celts went down like one man in 
awe before him. He was their born king. It is 
what the actors call a fine moment. Still, nobody 
has ever told us how Orry and the Celts under- 
stood one another, speaking different tongues. Let 
us not ask. 

King Orry had come to stay, and sea-warriors 
do not usually bring their women over tempestuous 
seas. So the Norsemen married the Celtic women, 
and from that union came the Manx people. Thus 



12 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

the Manxman to begin with was half Norse, half 
Celt. He is much the same still. Manxmen 
usually marry Manx women, and when they do not, 
they often marry Cumberland women. As the 
Norseman settled in Cumberland as well as in Man 
the race is not seriously affected either way. So 
the Manxman, such as he is, taken all the centuries 
through, is thoroughbred. 

Now what King Orry did in the Isle of Man 
was the greatest work that ever was done there. 
He established our Constitution. It was on the 
model of the Constitution just established in Iceland. 
The government was representative and patriarchal. 
The Manx people being sea-folk, living by the sea, 
a race of fishermen and sea-rovers, he divided the 
island into six ship-shires, now called Sheadings. 
Each ship-shire elected four men to an assemblage 
of law-makers. This assemblage, equivalent to the 
Icelandic Logretta, was called the House of Keys. 
There is no saying what the word means. Prof. 
Rhys thinks it is derived from the Manx name 
Kiare-as-Feed, meaning the four-and-twenty. 
Train says the representatives were called Taxiaxi 
signifying pledges or hostages, and consequently 
were styled Keys. Vigfusson's theory was that 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 13 

Keys is from the Norse word Kcise, or chosen 
men. The common Manx notion, the idea familiar 
to my own boyhood, is, that the twenty-four 
members of the House of Keys are the twenty-four 
material keys whereby the closed doors of the law 
are unlocked. But besides the sea-folk of the 
ship-shires King Orry remembered the Church. 
He found it on the island at his coming, left it 
where he found it, and gave it a voice in the 
government. He established a Tynwald Court, 
equivalent to the Icelandic All Moot, where Church 
arid State sat together. Then he appointed two 
law-men, called Deemsters, one for the north and 
the other for the south. These were equivalent to 
his Icelandic Logsogumadur, speaker of the law 
and judge of all offences. Finally, he caused to be 
built an artificial Mount of Laws, similar in its 
features to the Icelandic Logberg at Thingvellir. 
Such was the machinery of the Norse Constitution 
which King Orry established in Man. The work- 
ing of it was very simple. The House of Keys, 
the people's delegates, discussed all questions of 
interest to the people, and sent up its desires to 
the Tynwald Court. This assembly of people and 
Church in joint session assented, and the desires ot 



i 4 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

the people became Acts of Tynwald. These Acts 
were submitted to the King. Having obtained the 
King's sanction they were promulgated on the 
Tynwald Hill on the national day in the presence 
of the nation. The scene of that promulgation of 
the laws was stirring and impressive. Let me 
describe it. 

The Tynwald 

Perhaps there were two Tynwald Hills in King 
Orry's time, but I shall assume that there was one 
only. It stood somewhere about midway in the 
island. In the heart of a wide range of hill and 
dale, with a long valley to the south, a hill to the 
north, a table-land to the east, and to the west the 
broad Irish Sea. Not, of course, a place to be 
compared with the grand and gloomy valley of the 
Logberg, where in a vast amphitheatre of dark hills 
and great jokulls tipped with snow, with deep 
chasms and yawning black pits, one's heart stands 
still. But the place of the Manx Tynwald was an 
impressive spot. The Hill itself was a circular 
mount cut into broad steps, the apex being only a 
few feet in diameter. About it was a flat erass 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 15 

plot. Near it, just a hundred and forty yards 
away, connected with the mount by a beaten path, 
was a chapel. All around was bare and solitary, 
perhaps as bleak and stark as the lonely plains of 
Thingvellir. 

Such was the scene. Hither came the King and 
his people on Tynwald Day. It fell on the 
24th of June, the first of the seven days of the 
Icelandic gathering of the Althing. What occurred 
in Iceland occurred also in Man. The King with 
his Keys and his clergy gathered in the chapel. 
Thence they passed in procession to the law-rock. 
On the top round of the Tynwald the King sat on 
a chair and faced to the east. His sword was held 
before him, point upwards. His barons and 
beneficed men, his deemsters, knights, esquires, 
coroners, and yeomen, stood on the lower steps of 
the mount. On the grass plot beyond the people 
were gathered in crowds. Then the work of the 
day began. The coroners proclaimed a warning. 
No man should make disturbance at Tynwald on 
pain of death. Then the Acts of Tynwald were 
read or recited aloud by the deemsters ; first in the 
language of the laws, and next in the language of 
the people. After other formalities the procession 



16 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

of the King returned to the chapel, where the laws 
were signed and attested, and so the annual 
Tynwald ended. 

Now this primitive ceremonial, begun by King 
Orry early in the tenth century, is observed to this 
day. On Midsummer-day of this year of grace a 
ceremony similar in all its essentials will be 
observed by the present Governor, his Keys, clergy, 
deemsters, coroners, and people, on or near the 
same spot. It is the old Icelandic ordinance, but it 
has gone from Iceland. The year 1800 saw the 
last of it on the lava law-rock of Thingvellir. It is 
gone from every other Norse kingdom founded by 
the old sea-rovers among the Western Isles. 
Manxmen alone have held on to it. Shall we also 
let it go ? Shall we laugh at it as a bit of mummery 
that is useless in an age of books and newspapers, 
and foolish and pompous in days of frock-coats 
and chimney-pot hats ? I think not. We cannot 
afford to lose it. Remember, it is the last visible 
sign of our independence as a nation. It is our 
hand-grasp with the past. Our little nation is the 
only Norse nation now on earth that can shake 
hands with the days of the Sagas, and the Sea- 
Kings. Then let him who will laugh at our 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 17 

primitive ceremonial. It is the badge of our 
ancient liberty, and we need not envy the man who 
can look on it unmoved. 

The Lost Saga 

Of King Orry himself we learn very little. He 
was not only the first of our kings, but also the 
greatest. We may be sure of that ; first, by what 
we know ; and next, by what we do not know. He 
was a conqueror, and yet we do not learn that he 
ever attempted to curtail the liberties of his sub- 
jects. He found us free men, and did not try to 
make us slaves. On the contrary, he gave us a 
representative Constitution, which has lasted a 
thousand years. We might call him our Manx 
King Alfred, if the indirections of history did not 
rather tempt us to christen him our Manx King 
Lear. His Saga has never been written, or else it 
is lost. Would that we could recover it ! Oh, that 
imagination had the authority of history to vitalise 
the old man and his times ! I seem to see him as 
he lived. There are hints of his character in his 
laws, that are as stage directions, telling of the 
entrances and exits of his people, though the drama 

B 



18 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i 

of their day is gone. For example, in that pre- 
liminary warning of the coroner at Tynwald, there 
is a clause which says that none shall " bawl or 
quarrel or lye or lounge or sit." Do you not see 
what that implies ? Again, there is another clause 
which forbids any man, " on paine of life and lyme," 
to make disturbance or stir in the time of Tynwald, 
or any murmur or rising in the king's presence. 
Can you not read between the lines of that edict ? 
Once more, no inquest of a deemster, no judge or 
jury, was necessary to the death-sentence of a man 
who rose against the king or his governor on his 
seat on Tynwald. Nobody can miss the meaning 
of that. Once again, it was a common right of the 
people to present petitions at Tynwald, a common 
privilege of persons unjustly punished to appeal 
against judgment, and a common prerogative of out- 
laws to ask at the foot of the Tynwald Mount on 
Tynwald Day for the removal of their outlawry. 
All these old rights and regulations came from 
Iceland, and by the help of the Sagas it needs 
no special imagination to make the scenes of their 
action live again. I seem to see King Orry sitting 
on his chair on the Tynwald with his face towards 
he east. He has long given up sea-roving. 



lf.ct. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 19 

His long red hair is become grey or white. 
But the old lion has the muscles and fiery eye of 
the warrior still. His deemsters and barons are 
about him, and his people are on the sward below. 
They are free men ; they mean to have their rights, 
both from him and from each other. Disputes run 
high, there are loud voices, mighty oaths, sometimes 
blows, fights, and terrific hurly-burlies. Then old 
Orry comes down with a great voice and a sword, 
and ploughs a way through the fighters and scatters 
them. No man dare lift his hand on the king. 
Peace is restored, and the king goes back to his 
seat. 

Then up from the valley comes a woe-begone 
man in tatters, grim and gaunt and dirty, a famished 
and hunted wolf. He is an outlaw, has killed 
a man, is pursued in a blood-feud, and asks for 
relief of his outlawry. And so on and so on, a 
scene of rugged, lusty passions, hate and revenge, 
but also love and brotherhood ; drinking, laughing, 
swearing, fighting, savage vices but also savage 
virtues, noble contempt of death, and magnificent 
self-sacrifice. 

The chapter is lost, but we know what it must 
have been. King Orry was its hero. Our Manx 



20 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

Alfred, our Manx Arthur, our Manx Lear. Then 
room for him among our heroes ! he must stand 
high. 

The Manx Macbeth 

The line of Orry came to an end at the beginning 
of the eleventh century. Scotland was then under 
the swa}' of the tyrant Macbeth, and, oddly enough, 
a parallel tragedy to that of Duncan and his kinsman 
was being enacted in Man. A son of Harold the 
Black, of Iceland, Goddard Crovan, a mighty sol- 
dier, conquered the island and took the crown by 
treachery, coming first as a guest of the Manx king. 
Treachery breeds treachery, duplicity is a bad seed 
to sow for loyalty, and the Manx people were 
divided in their allegiance. About twenty years after 
Crovan's conquest the people of the south of the 
island took up arms against the people of the north, 
and the story goes that, when victory wavered, the 
women of the north rushed out to the help of their 
husbands, and so won the fight. For that day's 
work, the northern wives were given the right to 
half of all their husband's goods immovable, while 
the wives of the south had only a third. The last 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 21 

of the line of Goddard Crovan died in 1265, and 
so ended the dynasty of the Norsemen in Man. 
They had been three hundred years there. They 
found us a people of the race and language of the 
people of Ireland, and they left us Manxmen. 
They were our only true Manx kings, and when 
they fell, our independence as a nation ceased. 



The Manx Glo'ster 

Then the first pretender to the throne was one 
Ivar, a murderer, a sort of Richard III., not all bad, 
but nearly all ; said to possess virtues enough to 
save the island and vices enough to ruin it. The 
island was surrendered to Scotland by treaty with 
Norway. The Manx hated the Scotch. They knew 
them as a race of pirates. Some three centuries 
later there was one Cutlar MacCullock, whose name 
was a terror, so merciless were his ravages. Over 
the cradles of their infants the Manx mothers sang 
this song : — 

God keep the good corn, the sheep and the bullocks, 
From Satan, from sin and from Cutlar MacCullock. 

Bad as Ivar was, the Scotch threatened to be worse. 



22 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

So the Manx, fearing that their kingdom might 
become a part of the kingdom of Scotland, sup- 
ported Ivar. They were beaten. Ivar was a brave 
tiger, and died fighting. 

Scotch and Engli:h Dominion 

Man was conquered, and the King of Scotland 
appointed a lieutenant to rule the island. But the 
Manx loved the Scotch no better as masters than 
as pirates, and they petitioned the English king, 
Edward I., to take them under his protection. He 
came, and the Scotch were driven out. But King 
Robert Bruce reconquered the island for the Scotch. 
Yet again the island fell to English dominion. 
This was in the time of Henry IV. It is a sorry 
story. Henry gave the island to the Earl of 
Salisbury. Salisbury sold it to one Sir William le 
Scroop. A copy of the deed of sale exists. It 
puts a Manxman's teeth on edge. " With all the 
right of being crowned with a golden crown." 
Scroop was beheaded by Henry, who confiscated 
his estate, and gave the island to the Earl of 
Northumberland. It is a silly inventory, but let us 
get through with it. Northumberland was banished, 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 23 

and finally Henry made a grant of the island to Sir 
John de Stanley. This was in 1407. Thus there 
had been four Kings of Man — not one of whom had, 
so far as I know, set foot on its soil — three grants 
of the island, and one miserable sale. Where the 
carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered to- 
gether. 

The Stanley Dynasty 

When the crown came to Sir John Stanley he 
was in no hurry to put it on. He paid no heed to 
his Manx subjects, and never saw his Manx king- 
dom. I dare say he thought the gift horse was 
something of a white elephant. No wonder if he 
did, for words could not exaggerate the wretched 
condition of the island and its people. The houses 
of the poor were hovels built of sod,with floors of clay, 
and sooty rafters of briar and straw and dried gorse. 
The people were hardly better fed than their beasts. 
So Stanley left the island alone. It will be in- 
teresting to mark how different was the mood of 
his children, and his children's children. The 
second Stanley went over to Man and did good 
work there. He promulgated our laws, and had 



24 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

them written down for the first time — they had 
hitherto been locked in the breasts of the deem- 
sters in imitation of the practice of the Druids. 
The line of the Stanleys lasted more than three 
hundred years. Their rule was good for the island. 
They gave the tenants security of tenure, and 
the landowners an act of settlement. They lifted 
the material condition of our people, gave us the 
enjoyment of our venerable laws, and ratified our 
patriarchal Constitution. Honour to the Stanleys 
of the Manx dynasty ! They have left a good mark 
on Man. 

Iliam Dhoan 

And now I come to the one incident in modern 
Manx history which shares, with the three legs of 
Man and the Manx cat, the consciousness of every- 
body who knows anything about our island and its 
people. This is the incident of the betrayal of 
Man and the Stanleys to the Parliament in the time 
of Cromwell. It was a stirring drama, and though 
the curtain has long fallen on it, the dark stage is 
still haunted by the ghosts of its characters. Chief 
among these was William Christian, the Manxman 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 25 

called Iliam Dhoan, Brown William, a familiar 
name that seems to hint of a fine type of man. 
You will find him in " Peveril of the Peak." He 
is there mixed up with Edward Christian, a very 
different person, just as Peel Castle is mixed up 
with Castle Rushen, consciously no doubt, and with 
an eye to imaginative effects, for Scott had a brother 
in the Isle of Man who could have kept him from 
error if fact had been of any great consequence in 
the novelist's reckoning. 

Christian was Receiver-General, a sort of 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the great Earl of 
Derby. The Earl had faith in him, and put nearly 
everything under his command that fell within the 
province of his lordship. Then came the struggle 
with Rigby at Latham House, and the imprisonment 
of the Earl's six children by Fairfax. The Manx 
were against the Parliament, and subscribed ^"500, 
probably the best part of the money in the island, 
in support of the king. Then the Earl of Derby 
left the island with a body of volunteers, and in 
going away committed his wife to the care of 
Christian. You know what happened to him. He 
was taken prisoner in Lancashire, charged with 
bearing arms for Charles Stuart and holding the 



26 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

Isle of Man against the Commons, condemned, and 
executed at Bolton. 

With the forfeiture of the Earl the lordship of 
the island was granted by Parliament to Lord 
Fairfax. He sent an army to take possession, but 
the Countess-Dowager still held the island. 
Christian commanded the Manx militia. At this 
moment the Manx people showed signs of disaffec- 
tion. They suddenly remembered two grievances, 
one was a grievance of land tenure, the other was 
that a troop of soldiers was kept at free quarterage. 
I cannot but wish they had bethought them of both 
a little earlier. They formed an association, and 
broke into rebellion against the Countess-Dowager 
within eight days of the Earl's execution. Perhaps 
they did not know of the Earl's death, for news 
travelled slowly over sea in those days. But at 
least they knew of his absence. As a Manxman I 
am not proud of them. 

During these eight days Mr. Receiver-General 
had begun to trim his sails. He had a lively wit, 
and saw which way things were going. Rumour 
says he was at the root of the secret association. 
Be that as it may, he carried the demands of the 
people to the Countess. She had no choice but to 



lect. i] TllE LITTLE MANX NATION 27 

yield. The troops were disbanded. It was a bad 

victory. 

A fortnight before, when her husband lay under 
his death sentence, the Countess had offered the 
island in exchange for his life. So now Mr. 
Receiver-General used this act of love against her. 
He seized some of the forts, saying the Countess 
was selling the island to the Parliament. Then the 
army of the Parliament landed, and Christian 
straightway delivered the island up to it, protesting 
that he had taken the forts on its behalf. Some 
say the Countess was imprisoned in the vaults of 
the Castle. Others say she had a free pass to 
England. So ended act one. 

When the act-drop rose on act two, Mr. Receiver- 
General was in office under the Parliament. From 
the place of Receiver-General he was promoted to 
the place of Governor. He had then the money of 
the island under his control, and he used it badly. 
Deficits were found in his accounts. He fled to 
London, was arrested for a large debt, and clapped 
into the Fleet. Then the Commonwealth fell, the 
Dowager Countess went upstairs again, and Charles 
II. restored the son of the great Earl to the lordship 
of Man. After that came the Act of Indemnity, a 



28 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lict. i 

general pardon for all who had taken part against 
the royal cause. Thereupon Christian went back 
to the Isle of Man, was arrested on a charge of 
treason to the Countess-Dowager of Derby, pleaded 
the royal act of general pardon against all proceed- 
ings libelled against him, was tried by the House of 
Keys, and condemned to death. So ended act 
two. 

Christian had a nephew, Edward Christian, who 
was one of the two deemsters. This man dis- 
sented from the voice of the court, and hastened 
to London to petition the king. Charles is said to 
have heard his plea, and to have sent an order to 
suspend sentence. Some say the order came too 
late ; some say the Governor had it early enough 
and ignored it. At all events Christian was shot. 
He protested that he had never been anything but 
a faithful servant to the Derbys, and made a brave 
end. The place of his execution was Hango Hill, 
a bleak, bare stretch of land with the broad sea under 
it. The soldiers wished to bind Christian. " Trouble 
not yourselves for me," he said, " for I that dare 
face death in whatever shape he comes, will not 
start at your fire and bullets." He pinned a piece 
of white paper on his breast, and said : " Hit this, 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 29 

and you do your own work and mine." Then he 
stretched forth his arms as a signal, was shot through 
the heart, and fell. Such was the end of Brown 
William. He may have been a traitor, but he was 
no coward. 

When the chief actor in the tragedy had fallen, 
King Charles appeared, as Fortinbras appears in 
" Hamlet," to make a review and a reckoning, and 
to take the spoils. He ordered the Governor, the 
remaining Deemsters, and three of the Keys to be 
brought before him, pronounced the execution of 
Christian to be a violation of his general pardon, 
and imposed severe penalties of fine and imprison- 
ment. " The rest " in this drama has not been 
" silence." One long clamour has followed. Chris- 
tian's guilt has been questioned, the legality of his 
trial has been disputed, the validity of Charles's 
censure of the judges has been denied. The 
case is a mass of tangle, as every case must 
be that stands between the two stools of the 
Royal cause and the Commonwealth. But I 
shall make bold to summarise the truth in a very 
few words : 

First, that Christian was untrue to the house of 
Derby is as clear as noonday. If he had been 



30 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [i.ect. i 

their loyal servant he could never have taken office 
under the Parliament. 

Second, though untrue to the Countess-Dowager, 
Christian could not be guilty of treason to her, 
because she had ceased to be the sovereign when her 
husband was executed. Fairfax was then the Lord 
of Man, and Christian was guilty of no treason to hiin. 

Third, whether true or untrue to the Countess- 
Dowager, the act of pardon had nothing on earth 
to do with Christian, who was not charged with 
treason to King Charles, but to the Manx reigning 
family. The Isle of Man was not a dominion of 
England, and if Charles's order had arrived before 
Christian's execution, the Governor, Keys, and Deem- 
ster would have been fully justified in shooting the 
man in defiance of the king. 

I feel some diffidence in offering this opinion, 
but I can have none whatever in saying what I 
think of Christian. My fellow Manxmen are for the 
most part his ardent supporters. They affirm his 
innocence, and protest that he was a martyr-hero, 
declaring that at least he met his fate by asserting 
the rights of his countrymen. I shall not hesitate 
to say that I read the facts another way. This is 
how I see the man : 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 31 

First, he was a servant of the Delias, honoured, 
empowered, entrusted with the care of his mistress, 
the Countess, when his master, the Earl, left the 
island to fight for the king. Second, eight days 
after his master's fate, he rose in rebellion against 
his mistress and seized some of the forts of 
defence. Third, he delivered the island to the army 
of the Parliament, and continued to hold his office 
under it. Fourth, he robbed the treasury of the 
island and fled from his new masters, the Parlia- 
ment. Fifth, when the new master fell he chopped 
round, became a king's man once more, and 
returned to the island on the strength of the general 
pardon. Sixth, when he was condemned to death 
he, who had held office under the Parliament, 
protested that he had never been anything but a 
faithful servant to the Derbys. 

Such is Christian. He a hero! No, but a 
poor, sorry, knock-kneed time-server. A thing of 
rags and patches. A Manx Vicar of Bray. Let 
us talk of him as little as we may, and boast of him 
not at all. Man and Manxmen have no need ot 
him. No, thank God, we can tell of better men. 
Let us turn his picture to the wall. 



32 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

The Athol Dynasty 

The last of the Stanleys of the Manx dynasty 
died childless in 1735, and then the lordship of Man 
devolved by the female line on the second Duke of 
Athol by right of his grandmother, who was a 
daughter of the great Earl of Derby. There is 
little that is good to say of the Lords of the House 
of Athol except that they sold the island. Almost 
the first, and quite the best, thing they did on coming 
to Man, was to try to get out of it. Let us make 
no disguise of the clear truth. The Manx Athols 
were bad, and nearly everything about them was bad. 
Never was the condition of the island so abject as 
during their day. Never were the poor so poor. 
Never was the name of Manxman so deservedly a 
badge of disgrace. The chief dishonour was that 
of the Athols. They kept a swashbuckler court 
in their little Manx kingdom. Gentlemen of the 
type of Barry Lyndon overran it. Captain 
Macheaths, Jonathan Wilds, and worse, were mas- 
ters of the island, which was now a refuge for 
debtors and felons. Roystering, philandering, 
gambling, fighting, such was the order of things. 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 33 

What days they had ! What nights ! His Grace 
of Athol was himself in the thick of it all. He 
kept a deal of company, chiefly rogues and rascals. 
For example, among his " lord captains " was one 
Captain Fletcher. This Blue Beard had a magni- 
ficent horse, to which, when he was merry, he 
made his wife, who was a religious woman, kneel 
down and say her prayers. The mother of my 
friend, the Reverend T. E. Brown, came upon the 
dead body of one of these Barry Lyndons, who had 
fallen in a duel, and the blue mark was on the 
white forehead, where the pistol shot had been. 
I remember to have heard of another Sir Lucius 
O'Trigger, whose body lay exposed in the hold of a 
fishing-smack, while a parson read the burial service 
from the quay. This was some artifice to prevent 
seizm^e for debt. Oh, these good old times, with 
their soiled and dirty splendours ! There was no 
lively chronicler, no Pepys, no Walpole then, to 
give us a picture of the Court of these Kings of 
Man. What a picture it must have been ! Can 
you not see it ? The troops of gentlemen debtors 
from theCoffee Houses of London, with their periwigs, 
their canes, and fine linen ; down on their luck, but 
still beruffled, besnuffed, and red-heeled. I can 

c 



34 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

see them strutting with noses up, through old 
Douglas market-place on market morning, past the 
Manx folk in their homespun, their curranes and 
undyed stockings. Then out at Mount Murray, the 
home of the Athols, their imitations of Vauxhall, 
torches, dancings, bows and conges, bankrupt 
shows, perhaps, but the bankrupt Barrys making 
the best of them — one seems to see it all. And then 
again, their genteel quarrels — quarrels were easily 
bred in that atmosphere. " Sir, I have the honour 
to tell you that you are a pimp, lately escaped from 
the Fleet." " My lord, permit me to say that 
you lie, that you are the son of a lady, and 
were born in a sponging-house." Then out leapt 
the weapons, and presently two men were crossing 
swords under the trees, and by-and-by one of 
them was left under the moonlight, with the 
shadow of the leaves playing on his white face. 

Poor gay dogs, they are dead ! The page of 
their history is lost. Perhaps that is just as well. 
It must have been a dark page, maybe a little red 
too, even as blood runs red. You can see the scene 
of their revelries. It is an inn now. The walls 
seem to echo to their voices. But the tables 
they ate at are like themselves — worm-eaten. 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 35 

Good-bye to them ! They have gone over the 
Styx. 



Smuggling and Wrecking 

00 o o 



Meanwhile, what of the Manx people ? Their 
condition was pitiful. An author who wrote fifty 
years after the advent of the Athols gives a descrip- 
tion of such misery that one's flesh creeps as one 
reads it. Badly housed, badly clad, badly fed> and 
hardly taught at all, the very poor were in a state 
of abjectness unfit for dogs. Treat men as dogs 
and they speedily acquire the habits of dogs, the 
vices of dogs, and none of their virtues. That was 
what happened to a part of the Manx people ; they 
developed the instincts of dogs, while their masters, 
the other dogs, the gay dogs, were playing their 
bad game together. Smuggling became common on 
the coasts of Man. Spirits and tobacco were the 
goods chiefly smuggled, and the illicit trade rose 
to a great height. There was no way to check it. 
The island was an independent kingdom. My lord 
of Athol swept in the ill-gotten gains, and his 
people got what they could. It was a game of grab. 
Meantime the trade of the surrounding countries, 



36 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

England, Wales, and Ireland, was suffering griev- 
ously. The name of the island must have smelt 
strong in those days. 

But there was a fouler odour than that of 
smuggling. Wrecking was not unknown. The 
island lent itself naturally to that evil work. The 
mists of Little Mannanan, son of Lear, did not for- 
sake our island when Saint Patrick swept him out 
of it. They continued to come up from the south, 
and to conspire with the rapid currents from the 
north to drive ships on to our rocks. Our coasts 
were badly lighted, or lighted not at all. An open 
flare stuck out from a pole at the end of a pier was 
often all that a dangerous headland had to keep 
vessels away from' it. Nothing was easier than 
for a fishing smack to run down pole and flare 
together, as if by accident, on returning to harbour. 
But there was a worse danger than bad lights, and 
that was false lights. It was so easy to set them. 
Sometimes they were there of themselves, without 
evil intention of any human soul, luring sailors to 
their destruction. Then when ships came ashore 
it was so easy to juggle with one's conscience and 
say it was the will of God, and no bad doings of 
any man's. The poor sea-going men were at the 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 37 

bottom of the sea by this time, and their cargo was 
drifting up with the tide, so there was nothing to 
do but to take it. Such was the way of tilings. 
The Manxman could find his excuses. He was 
miserably poor, he had bad masters, smuggling was 
his best occupation, his coasts were indifferently 
lighted, ships came ashore of themselves — what was 
he to do ? That the name of Manxman did not 
become a curse, an execration, and a reproach in 
these evil days of the Athols seems to say that 
behind all this wicked work there were splendid 
virtues doing noble duty somewhere. The real sap, 
the true human heart of Manxland, was somehow 
kept alive. Besides cut-throats in ruffles, and 
wreckers in homespun, there were true, sweet, 
simple-hearted people who would not sell their souls 
to fill their mouths. 

Does it surprise you that some of all this comes 
within the memory of men still living ? 1 am 
myself well within the period of middle life, and, 
though too young to touch these evil days, I can 
remember men and women who must have been in 
the thick of them. On the north of the island is 
Kirk Maughold Head, a bold, rugged headland 
going far out into the sea. Within this rocky fore- 



38 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.i 

land lie two bays, sweet coverlets of blue waters, 
washing a shingly shore under shelter of dark cliffs. 
One of these bays is called Port-y-Vullin, and just 
outside of it, between the mainland and the head, is 
a rock, known as the Carrick, a treacherous grey 
reef, visible at low water, and hidden at flood-tide. 
On the low brews of Port-y-Vullin stood two 
houses, the one a mill, worked by the waters coming 
down from the near mountain of Barrule, the other 
a weaver's cottage. Three weavers lived together 
there, all bachelors, and all old, and never a woman 
or child among them — Jemmy of eighty years, Danny 
of seventy, and Billy or sixty something. Year in, 
year out, they worked at their looms, and early or 
late, whenever you passed on the road behind, you 
heard the click of them. Fishermen coming back 
to harbour late at night always looked for the light 
of their windows. " Yander's Jemmy-Danny- 
Billy's," they would say, and steer home by that 
landmark. But the light which guided the native 
seamen misled the stranger, and many a ship in the 
old days was torn to pieces on the jagged teeth of 
that sea-lion, the Carrick. Then, hearing loud 
human cries above the shrieks of wind and wave, 
the three helpless old men would come tottering 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 39 

down to the beach, like three innocent witches, 
trembling and wailing, holding each other's hands 
like little children, and never once dreaming of 
what bad work the candles over their looms had 
done. 

But there were those who were not so guileless. 
Among them was a sad old salt, whom I shall call 
Hommy-Billy-mooar, Tommy, son of big Billy. 
Did I know him, or do I only imagine him as I 
have heard of him ? I cannot say, but nevertheless 
I see him plainly. One of his eyes was gone, and 
the other was badly damaged. His face was of 
stained mahogany, one side of his mouth turned up, 
the other side turned down, he could laugh and cry 
together. He was half landsman, tilling his own 
croft, half seaman, going out with the boats to 
the herrings. In his youth he had sailed on a 
smuggler, running in from Whitehaven with spirits. 
The joy of " the trade," as they called smuggling, 
was that a man could buy spirits at two shillings a 
gallon for sale on the island, and drink as much as 
he " plazed abooard for nothin'." When Hommy 
married, he lived in a house near the church, the 
venerable St. Maughold away on the headland, with 
its lonely churchyard within sound of the sea. 



40 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

There on tempestuous nights the old eagle looked 
out from his eyrie on the doings of the sea, over 
the back of the cottage of the old weavers to the 
Carrick. If anything came ashore he awakened his 
boys, scurried over to the bay, seized all they could 
carry, stole back home, hid his treasures in the 
thatch of the roof, or among the straw of the loft, 
went off to bed, and rose in the morning with an 
innocent look, and listened to the story of last 
night's doings with a face full of surprise. They 
say that Hommy carried on this work for years, 
and though many suspected, none detected him, not 
even his wife, who was a good Methodist. The 
poor woman found him out at last, and, being 
troubled with a conscience, she died, and Hommy 
buried her in Kirk Maughold churchyard, and put a 
stone over her with a good inscription. Then he 
went on as before. But one morning there was a 
mighty hue and cry. A ship had been wrecked on 
the Carrick, and the crew who were saved had seen 
some rascals carrying off in the darkness certain 
rolls of Irish cloth which they had thrown over- 
board. Suspicion lit on Hommy and his boys. 
Hommy was quite hurt. " Wrecking was it ? 
Lord a-massy ! To think, to think ! " Revenue 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 41 

officers were to come to-morrow to search his house. 
Those rolls of Irish cloth were under the thatch, 
above the dry gorse stored up on the " lath " in 
his cowhouse. That night he carried them off to 
the churchyard, took up the stone from over his 
wife's grave, dug the grave open and put in the 
cloth. Next day his one eye wept a good deal 
while the officers of revenue made their fruitless 
search. " Aw well, well, did they think because a 
man was poor he had no feelings ? " Afterwards 
he pretended to become a Methodist, and then he 
removed the cloth from his wife's grave because he 
had doubts about how she could rise in the 
resurrection with such a weight on her coffin. 
Poor old Hommy, he came to a bad end. He 
spent his last days in jail in Castle Rushen. A 
one-eyed mate of his told me he saw him there. 
Hommy was unhappy. He said " Castle Rushen 
wasn't no place for a poor man when he was gettin' 
anyways ould." 

The Revestment 

It is hardly a matter for much surprise that the 
British Government did what it could to curb the 



42 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

smuggling that was rife in Man in the days of the 
Athols. The bad work had begun in the days 
of the Uerbys, when an Act was passed which 
authorised the Earl of Derby to dispose of his 
royalty and revenue in the island, and empowered 
the Lords of the Treasury to treat with him for the 
sale of it. The Earl would not sell, and when the 
Duke of Athol was asked to do so, he tried to put 
matters off. But the evil had by this time grown 
so grievously that the British Government threatened 
to strip the Duke without remuneration. Then he 
agreed to accept ,£70,000 as compensation for the 
absolute surrender of the island. He was also to 
have ^"2000 out of the Irish revenue, which, as well 
as the English revenue, was to benefit by the 
suppression of the clandestine trade. This was in 
exchange for some £6000 a year which was the 
Duke's Manx revenue, much of it from duties and 
customs paid in goods which were afterwards 
smuggled into England, Ireland, and Scotland. So 
much for his Grace of Athol. Of course the Manx 
people got nothing. The thief was punished, the 
receiver was enriched ; it is the way of the world. 

In our history of Man, we call this sweet trans- 
action, which occurred in 1765, " The Revestment," 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 43 

meaning the revesting of the island in the crown of 
England. Our Manx people did not like it at all. 
I have heard a rugged old song on the subject sung 
at Manx inns : 

For the babes unborn shall rue the day 
When the Isle of Man was sold away ; 
And there's ne'er an old wife that loves a dram 
But she will lament for the Isle of Man. 

Clearly drams became scarce when " the trade " 
was put down. But, indeed, the Manx had the 
most strange fears and ludicrous sorrows. The 
one came of their anxiety about the fate of their 
ancient Constitution, the other came of their foolish 
generosity. They dreaded that the government of 
the island would be merged into that of England, 
and they imagined that because the Duke of Athol 
had been compelled to surrender, he had been 
badly treated. Their patriotism was satisfied when 
the Duke of Athol was made Governor-in-Chief 
under the English crown, for then it was clear that 
they were to be left alone ; but their sympathy was 
moved to see him come back as servant who had 
once been lord. They had disliked the Duke of 
Athol down to that hour, but they forgot their 
hatred in sight of his humiliation, and when he 



44 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

landed in his new character, they received him with 
acclamations. I am touched by the thought of 
my countrymen's unselfish conduct in that hour ; 
but I thank God I was not alive to witness it. 
I should have shrieked with laughter. The ab- 
surdity of the situation passes the limits even of a 
farce. A certain Duke, who had received ,£6000 
a year, whereof a large part came of an immoral 
trade, had been to London and sold his interest in 
it for £70,000, because if he had not taken that, he 
would probably have got nothing. With thirteen 
years' purchase of his insecure revenue in his 
pocket, and £2000 a year promised, and his 
salary as Governor-in-Chief besides, he returns to 
the island where half the people are impoverished 
by his sale of the island, and nobody else has 
received a copper coin, and everybody is doomed to 
pay back interest on what the Duke has received ! 
What is the picture ? The Duke lands at the old 
jetty, and there his carriage is waiting to take 
him to the house, where he and his have kept 
swashbuckler courts, with troops of fine gentlemen 
debtors from London." The Manxmen forget every- 
thing except that his dignity is reduced. They 
unyoke his horses, get into his shafts, drag him 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 45 

through the streets, toss up their caps and cry 
hurrah ! hurrah ! One seems to see the Duke 
sitting there with his arms folded, and his head on 
his breast. He can't help laughing. The thing 
is too ridiculous. Oh, if Swift had been there 
to see it, what a scorching satire we should have 
had! 

But the Athols soon spirited away their popu- 
larity. First they clamoured for a further sum on 
account of the lost revenues, and they got it. Then 
they tried to appropriate part of the income of the 
clergy. Again, they put members of their family 
into the bishopric, and one of them sold his tithes 
to a factor who tried to extort them by strong 
measures, which led to green crop riots. In the 
end, their gross selfishness, which thought of their 
own losses but forgot the losses of the people, 
raised such open marks of aversion in the island 
that they finally signified to the king their desire 
to sell all their remaining rights, their land and 
manorial rights. This they did in 1829, receiving 
altogether, for custom, revenue, tithes, patronage 
of the bishopric, and quit rents, the sum of 
£"416,000. Such was the value to the last of the 
Athols of the Manx dynasty, of that little hungry 



46 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

island of the Irish Sea, which Henry IV. gave to 
the Stanleys, and Sir John de Stanley did not think 
worth while to look at. So there was an end of 
the House of Athol. Exit the House of Athol ! 
The play goes on without them. 

Home Rule 

It might be said that with the final sale of 1829 
the history of the Isle of Man came to a close. 
Since then we have been in the happy condition of 
the nation without a history. Man is now a de- 
pendency of the English crown. The crown is 
represented by a Lieutenant-Governor. Our old 
Norse Constitution remains. We have Home Rule, 
and it works well. The Manx people are attached 
to the throne of England, and her Majesty has not 
more loyal subjects in her dominions. We are 
deeply interested in Imperial affairs, but we have no 
voice in them. I do not think we have ever dreamt 
of a day when we should send representatives to 
Westminster. Our sympathies as a nation are not 
altogether, I think, with the party of progress. We 
are devoted to old institutions, and hold fast to such 
of them as are our own. All this is, perhaps, what 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 47 

you would expect of a race of islanders with our 
antecedents. 

Our social history has not been brilliant. I do 
not gather that the Isle of Man was ever Merry 
Man. Not even in its gayest days do we catch any 
note of merriment amid the rumpus of its revelries. 
It is an odd thing that woman plays next to no part 
whatever in the history of the island. Surely ours 
is the only national pie in which woman has not 
had a finger. In this respect the island justifies 
the ungallant reading of its name — it is distinctly 
the Isle of Man. Not even amid the glitter and 
gewgaws of our Captain Macheaths do you catch 
the glint of the gown of a Polly. No bevy of ladies, 
no merry parties, no pageants worthy of the name. 
No, our social history gives no idea of Merry 
Man. 

Our civil history is not glorious. We are com- 
pelled to allow that it has no heroism in it. There 
has been no fight for principle, no brave endurance 
of wrong. Since the days of Orry, we have had 
nothing to tell in Saga, if the Sagaman were here. 
We have played no part in the work of the world. 
The great world has been going on for ten centuries 
without taking: much note of us. We are a little 



48 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

nation, but even little nations have held their own. 
We have not. 

One great king we have had, King Orry. He 
gave us our patriarchal Constitution, and it is a fine 
thing. It combines most of the best qualities of 
representative government. Its freedom is more 
free than that of some republics. The people seem 
to be more seen, and their voice more heard, than in 
any other form of government whose operation I 
have witnessed. Yet there is nothing noisy about 
our Home Rule. And this Constitution we have 
kept alive for a thousand years, while it has died 
out of every other Norse kingdom. That is, per- 
haps, our highest national honour. We may have 
played a timid part ; we may have accepted rulers 
from anywhere ; we may never have made a 
struggle for independence ; and no Manxman may 
ever have been strong enough to stand up alone for 
his people. It is like our character that we have 
taken things easily, and instead of resisting our 
enemies, or throwing them from our rocky island 
into the sea, we have been law abiding under law- 
less masters and peaceful under oppression. But 
this one thing we have done : we have clung to our 
patriarchal Constitution, not caring a ha'p'orth who 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 49 

administered our laws so long as the laws were our 
own. That is something ; I think it is a good deal. 
It means that through many changes undergone 
by the greater peoples of the world, we are King 
Orry's men still. Let me in a last word tell you a 
story which shows what that description implies. 

Orry's Sons 

On the west coast of the Isle of Man stands the 
town of Peel. It is a little fishing port, looking 
out on the Irish Sea. To the north of it there is a 
broad shore, to the south lies the harbour with a 
rocky headland called Contrary Head ; in front — 
until lately divided from the mainland by a narrow 
strait — is a rugged island rock. On this rock stand 
the broken ruins of a castle, Peel Castle, and never 
did castle stand on a grander spot. The sea flows 
round it, beating on the jagged cliffs beneath, and 
behind it are the wilder cliffs of Contrary. In the 
water between and around Contrary contrary cur- 
rents flow, and when the wind is high they race 
and prance there like an unbroken horse. It is a 
grand scene, but a perilous place for ships. 

One afternoon in October of 1889 a Norwegian 



50 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

ship (strange chance ! ), the St. George (name 
surely chosen by the Fates ! ), in a fearful tempest 
was drifting on to Contrary Head. She was 
labouring hard in the heavy sea, rearing, plunging, 
creaking, groaning,and driving fast through clamour- 
ing winds and threshing breakers on to the cruel, 
black, steep horns of rock. All Peel was down at 
the beach watching her. Flakes of sea-foam were 
flying around, and the waves breaking on the 
beach were scooping up the shingle and flinging it 
through the air like sleet. 

Peel has a lifeboat, and it was got out. There 
were so many volunteers that the harbour-master 
had difficulties of selection. The boat got off; the 
coxswain was called Charlie Cain ; one of his crew 
was named Gorry, otherwise Orry. It was a 
perilous adventure. The Norwegian had lost her 
masts, and her spars were floating around her in the 
snow-like surf. She was dangerous to approach, 
but the lifeboat reached her. Charlie cried out to 
the Norwegian captain : " How many of you ? " 
The answer came back, " Twenty-two ! " Charlie 
counted them as they hung on at the ship's side, 
and said : "I only see twenty-one ; not a man shall 
leave the ship until you bring the odd one on 



lect. i] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 51 

deck." The odd one, a disabled man, had been 
left below to his fate. Now he was brought up, 
and all were taken aboard the lifeboat. 

On landing at Peel there was great excitement, 
men cheering and women crying. The Manx 
women spotted a baby among the Norwegians, 
fought for it, one woman got it, and carried it off to 
a fire and dry clothing. It was the captain's wife's 
baby, and an hour afterwards the poor captain's wife, 
like a creature distracted, was searching for it all 
over the town. And to heighten the scene, report 
says that at that tremendous moment a splendid 
rainbow spanned the bay from side to side. That 
ought to be true if it is not. 

It was a brilliant rescue, but the moving part of 
the story is yet to tell. The Norwegian Govern- 
ment, touched by the splendid heroism of the 
Manxmen, struck medals for the lifeboat men and 
sent them across to the Governor. These medals 
were distributed last summer on the island rock 
within the ruins of old Peel Castle. Think of it ! 
One thousand years before, not far from- that same 
place, Orry the Viking came ashore from Denmark 
or Norway. And now his Manx sons, still bearing 
his very name, Orry, save from the sea the sons of 



52 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. i 

the brethren he left behind, and down the milky way, 
whence Orry himself once came, come now to the 
Manxmen the thanks and the blessings of their 
kinsmen, Orry's father's children. 

Such a story as this thrills one to the heart. It 
links Manxmen to the great past. What are a 
thousand years before it ? Time sinks away, and 
the old sea-warrior seems to speak to us still 
through the surf of that storm at Peel. 



THE STORY OF THE MANX BISHOPS 

Some years ago, in going down the valley of 
Foxdale, towards the mouth of Glen Rushen, I lost 
my way on a rough and unbeaten path under the 
mountain called Slieu Whallin. There I was met 
by a typical old Manx farmer, who climbed the 
hillside some distance to serve as my guide. " Aw, 
man," said he, " many a Sunday I've crossed these 
mountains in snow and hail together." I asked 
why on Sunday. " You see," said the old fellow, 
" I'm one of those men that have been guilty of 
what St. Paul calls the foolishness of preaching." 
It turned out that he was a local preacher to the 
Wesleyans, and that for two score years or more, in 
all seasons, in all weathers, every Sunday, year in, 
year out, he had made the journey from his farm in 
Foxdale to the western villages of Kirk Patrick, 



54 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

where his voluntary duty lay. He left me with a 
laugh and a cheery word. " Ask again at the cottage 
at the top of the brew," he shouted. " An ould 
widda lives there with her gel." At the summit of 
the hill, just under South Barrule, with Cronk-ny- 
arrey-Lhaa to the west, I came upon a disused lead 
mine, called the old Cross Vein, its shaft open save 
for a plank or two thrown across it, and filled with 
water almost to the surface of the ground. And 
there, under the lee of the roofless walls of the 
ruined engine-house, stood the tiny one-story 
cottage where I had been directed to inquire my 
way again. I knocked, and then saw the outer 
conditions of an existence about as miserable as the 
mind of man can conceive. The door was opened 
by a youngish woman, having a thin, white face, 
and within the little house an elderly woman was 
breaking scraps of vegetables into a pot that swung 
from a hook above a handful of turf fire, which 
burned on the ground. They were the widow and 
daughter. Their house consisted of two rooms, a 
living room and a sleeping closet, both open to the 
thatch, which was sooty with smoke. The floor 
was of bare earth, trodden hard and shiny. There 
was one little window in each apartment, but after 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 55 

the breakages of years, the panes were obscured 
by rags stuffed into the gaps to keep out the 
weather. The roof bore traces of damp, and I 
asked if the rain came into the house. " Och, yes, 
and bad, bad, bad ! " said the elder woman. " He 
left us, sir, years ago." That was her way of 
saying that her husband was dead, and that since 
his death there had been no man to do an odd 
job about the place. The two women lived by 
working in the fields, at weeding, at planting 
potatoes, at thinning cabbages, and at the hay in 
its season. Their little bankrupt barn belonged to 
them, and it was all they had. In that they lived, 
or lingered, on the mountain top, a long stretch of 
bare hillside, away from any neighbour, alone in 
their poverty, with mountains before and behind, 
the broad grey sea, without ship or sail, down a 
gully to the west, nothing visible to the east save 
the smoke from the valley where lay the habitations 
of men, nothing audible anywhere but the deep 
rumble of the waves' bellow, or the chirp of the 
birds overhead, or, perhaps, when the wind was 
southerly, the church bells on Sunday morning. 
Never have I looked upon such lonely penury, 
and yet there, even there, these forlorn women 



56 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

kept their souls alive. " Yes," they said, " we're 
working when we can get the work, and trusting, 
trusting, trusting still." 

I have lingered too long over this poor adventure 
of losing my way to Glen Rushen, but my little 
sketch may perhaps get you close to that side of 
Manx life whereon I wish to speak to-day. I 
want to tell the history of religion in Man, so far 
as we know it ; and better, to my thinking, than a 
grave or solid disquisition on the ways and doings 
of Bishops or Spiritual Barons, are any peeps into 
the hearts and home lives of the Manx, which will 
show what is called the " innate religiosity " of the 
humblest of the people. To this end also, when I 
have discharged my scant duty to church history, 
or perhaps in the course of my hasty exposition of 
it, I shall dwell on some of those homely manners 
and customs, which, more than prayer-books and 
printed services, tell us what our fathers believed* 
what we still believe, and how we stand towards 
that other life, that inner life, that is not concerned 
with what we eat and what we drink, and where- 
withal we shall be clothed. 



lect. 11] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 57 

The Druids 

And now, just as the first chapter of our Manx 
civil history is lost, so the first chapter of our 
church history is lost. That the Druids occupied 
the island seems to some people to be clear from 
many Celtic names and some remains, such as we 
are accustomed to call Druidical, and certain cus- 
toms still observed. Perhaps worthy of a word is 
the circumstance that in the parish where the Bishop 
now lives, and has always lived, Kirk Michael, there 
is a place called by a name which in the Manx 
signifies Chief Druid. Strangely are the faiths 01 
the ages linked together. 

Conversion to Christianity 

We do not know, with any certainty, at what 
time the island was converted to Christianity. The 
accepted opinion is that Christianity was established 
in Man by St. Patrick about the middle of the fifth 
century. The story goes that the Saint of Ireland 
was on a voyage thither from England, when a 
storm cast him ashore on a little islet on the western 



5 3 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

coast of Man. This islet was afterwards called 
St. Patrick's Isle. St. Patrick built his church on 
it. The church was rebuilt eight centuries later 
within the walls of a castle which rose on the same 
rocky site. It became the cathedral church of the 
island. When the Norwegians came they renamed 
the islet Holm Isle. Tradition says that St. 
Patrick's coming was in the time of Mannanan, the 
magician, our little Manx Prospero. It also says 
that St. Patrick drove Mannanan away, and that 
St. Patrick's successor, St. Germain, followed up 
the good work of exterminating evil spirits by driving 
out of the island all venomous creatures whatever. 
We sometimes bless the memory of St. Germain, 
and wish he would come again. 

The Early Bishops of Man 

After St. Germain came St. Maughold. This 
Bishop was a sort of transfigured Manx Caliban. I 
trust the name does him no wrong. He had been 
an Irish prince, had lived a bad, gross life as a 
robber at the head of a band of robbers, had been 
converted by St. Patrick, and, resolving to abandon 
the temptations of the world, had embarked on the 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 59 

sea in a wicker boat without oar or helm. Almost 
he had his will at once, but the north wind, which 
threatened to remove him from the temptations of 
this world, cast him ashore on the north of the Isle 
of Man. There he built his church, and the rocky 
headland whereon it stands is still known by his 
name. High on the craggy cliff-side, looking 
towards the sea, is a seat hewn out of the rock. 
This is called St. Maughold's Chair. Not far 
away there is a well supposed to possess miracu- 
lous properties. It is called St. Maughold's Well. 
Thus tradition has perpetuated the odour of his 
great sanctity, which is the more extraordinary in 
a variation of his legend, which says that it was not 
after his conversion, and in submission to the will 
of God, that he put forth from Ireland in his wicker 
boat, but that he was thrust out thus, with hands 
and feet bound, by way of punishment for his crimes 
as a captain of banditti. 

But if Maughold was Caliban in Ireland, he 
was more than Prospero in Man. Rumour of his 
piety went back to Ireland, and St. Bridget, who 
had founded a nunnery at Kildare, resolved on a 
pilgrimage to the good man's island. She crossed 
the water, attended by her virgins, called her 



6o THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

daughters of fire, founded a nunnery near Douglas, 
worked miracles there, touched the altar in testi- 
mony of her virginity, whereupon it grew green 
and flourished. This, if I may be pardoned the 
continued parallel, is our Manx Miranda. And in- 
deed it is difficult to shake off the idea that Shake- 
speare must have known something of the early 
story of Man, its magicians and its saints. We 
know the perfidy of circumstance, the lying tricks 
that fact is always playing with us, too well and 
painfully to say anything of the kind with certainty. 
But the angles of resemblance are many between 
the groundwork of the " Tempest " and the earliest 
of Manx records. Mannanan-beg-Mac-y-Lear, the 
magician who surrounded the island with mists 
when enemies came near in ships ; Maughold, the 
robber and libertine, bound hand and foot, and 
driven ashore in a wicker boat ; and then Bridget, 
the virgin saint. Moreover, the stories of Little Man- 
nanan, of St. Patrick, and of St. Maughold were 
printed in Manx in the sixteenth century. Truly 
that is not enough, for, after all, we have no evidence 
that Shakespeare, who knew everything, knew 
Manx. But then Man has long been famous for its 
seamen. We had one of them at Trafalgar, hold- 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 61 

ing Nelson in his arms when he died. The best 
days, or the worst days — which ? — of the trade of 
the West Coast of Africa saw Manx captains in the 
thick of it. Shall I confess to you that in the bad 
days of the English slave trade the four merchant- 
men that brought the largest black cargo to the big- 
human auction mart at the Goree Piazza at Liver- 
pool were commanded by four Manxmen ! They 
were a sad quartet. One of them had only one arm 
and an iron hook ; another had only one arm and 
one eye ; a third had only one leg and a stump ; the 
fourth was covered with scars from the iron of the 
chains of a slave which he had worn twelve months 
at Barbadoes. Just about enough humanity in the 
four to make one complete man. But with vigour 
enough, fire enough, heart enough — I daren't say 
soul enough — in their dismembered old trunks to 
make ten men apiece ; born sea-rovers, true sons of 
Orry, their blood half brine. WeJl, is it not con- 
ceivable that in those earlier days of treasure seek- 
ing, when Elizabeth's English captains were spoiling 
the Spaniard in the Indies, Manx sailors were also 
there ? If so, why might not Shakespeare, who 
must have ferreted out many a stranger creature, 
have found in some London tavern an old Manx 



62 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

sea-dog, who could tell him of the Manx Prospero, 
the Manx Caliban, and the Manx Miranda ? 

But I have rambled on about my sailors ; I must 
return to my Bishops. They seem to have been a 
line of pious, humble, charitable, godly men at the 
beginning. Irishmen, chiefly, living the lives of 
hermits and saints. Apparently they were at first 
appointed by the people themselves. Would it be 
interesting to know the grounds of selection ? One 
was selected for his sanctity, a natural qualification, 
but another was chosen because he had a pleasant 
face, and a fine portly figure ; not bad qualifications, 
either. Thus things went on for about a hundred 
years, and, for all we know, Celtic Bishops and 
Celtic people lived together in their little island in 
peace, hearing nothing of the loud religious hubbub 
that was disturbing Europe. 

Bishops of the Welsh Dynasty 

Then came the rule of the Welsh kings, and, 
though we know but little with certainty, we seem to 
realise that it brought great changes to the religious 
life of Man. The Church began to possess itself of 
lands ; the baronial territories of the island fell into 



uect. ii] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 63 

the hands of the clergy ; the early Bishops became 
Barons. This gave the Church certain powers of 
government. The Bishops became judges, and as 
judges they possessed great power over the person 
of the subject. Sometimes they stood in the 
highest place of all, being also Governor to the 
Welsh Kings. Then they were called Sword- 
Bishops. Their power at such times, when the 
crosier and sword were in the two hands of one 
man, must have been portentous, and even terrible. 
We have no records that picture what came of that. 
But it is not difficult to imagine the condition. 
The old order of things had passed away. The 
hermit-saints, the saintly hermits, had gone, and in 
their place were monkish barons, living in abbeys 
and monasteries, whipping the poor bodies of their 
people, as well as comforting their torn hearts, 
fattening on broad lands, praying each with his 
lips : " Give us this day our daily bread," but 
saying each to his soul : " Soul, thou hast much 
goods laid up for many years ; take thine ease ; 
eat, drink, and be merry." 



64 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 



Bishops of the Norse Dynasty 

Little as we know of these times, we see that 
things must have come to a pretty pass, for when 
the Scandinavian dynasty came in the ecclesiastical 
authorities were forbidden to exercise civil control 
over any subjects of the king that were not also the 
tenants of their own baronies. So the Bishops 
were required to confine themselves to keeping 
their own house in order. The Norse Constitution 
established in Man by King Orry made no effort to 
overthrow the Celtic Church founded by St. Patrick, 
and corrupted by his Welsh successors, but it cur- 
tailed its liberties, and reduced its dignity. It 
demanded as an act of fealty that the Bishop or 
chief Baron should hold the stirrup of the King's 
saddle, as he mounted his horse at Tynwald. But 
it still suffered the Bishop and certain of his clergy 
to sit in the highest court of the legislature. The 
Church ceased to be purely Celtic ; it became Celto- 
Scandinavian, otherwise Manx. It was under the 
Archbishop of Drontheim for its Metropolitan, and 
its young clergy were sent over to Drontheim to be 
educated. Its revenues were apportioned after the 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 65 

most apostolic manner ; one-third of the tithes to 
the Bishop for his maintenance, the support of his 
courts, his churches, and (miserable conclusion ! ) 
his prisons ; one-third to the priests, and the 
remaining third to the relief of the poor and the 
education of youth. It is a curious and significant 
fact that when the Reformation came the last third 
was seized by the lord. Good old lordly trick, we 
know it well ! 

Sodor and Man 

The Bishopric of the island was now no longer 
called the Bishopric of Man, but Sodor and Man. 
The title has given rise to much speculation. 
One authority derives it from Soterenssis, a name 
given by Danish writers to the western islands, 
and afterwards corrupted to Sodei-ensis. Another 
authority derives it from Sudreyjas, signif}ang 
in the Norwegian the Southern Isles. A third 
derives it from the Greek Soter, Saviour, to 
whose name the cathedral of Iona was dedicated. 
And yet a fourth authority derives it from the 
supposed third name of the little islet rock 
called variously Holm Isle, Sodor, Peel, and 

E 



66 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. h 

St. Patrick's Isle, whereon St. Patrick or St. 
Germain built his church. I can claim no right to 
an opinion where these good doctors differ, and 
shall content myself with saying that the balance 
of belief is in favour of the Norwegian derivation, 
which offers this explanation of the title of Bishop 
of Sodor and Man, that the Isle of Man was not 
included by the Norsemen in the southern cluster 
of islands called the Sudereys, and that the Bishop 
was sometimes called the Bishop of Man and the 
Isles, and sometimes Bishop of the Sudereys and 
the Isle of Man. Only one warning note shall I 
dare, as an ignorant layman, to strike on that 
definition, and it is this : that the title of Bishop of 
Sodor dates back to the seventh century certainly, 
and that the Norseman did not come south until 
three centuries later. 

The Early Bishops of the House 
of Stanley 

But now I come to matters whereon I have more 
authority to speak. When the Isle of Man passed 
to the Stanley family, the Bishopric fell to their 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 67 

patronage, and they lost no time in putting their 
own people into it. It was then under the English 
metropolitan of Canterbury, but early in the six- 
teenth century it became part of the province of 
York. About that time the baronies, the abbeys, 
and the nunneries were suppressed. It does 
not appear that the change of metropolitan had 
made much change of religious life. Apparently 
the clergy kept the Manx people in miserable ig- 
norance. It was not until the seventeenth century 
that the Book of Common Prayer was translated 
into the Manx language. The Gospels and the 
Acts were unknown to the Manx until nearly a 
century later. Nor was this due to ignorance of 
the clergy of the Manx tongue, for most of them 
must have been Manxmen, and several of the 
Bishops were Manxmen also. But grievous abuses 
had by this time attached themselves to the Manx 
Church, and some of them were flagrant and wicked, 
and some were impudent and amusing. 

Tithes in Kind 

Naturally the more outrageous of the latter sort 
gathered about the process of collecting tithes. 



68 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. u 

Tithes were paid in kind in those days. It was 
not until well within our own century that they 
were commuted to a money payment. The Manx- 
man paid tithe on everything. He began to pay 
tithe before coming into the world, and he went on 
paying tithe even after he had gone out of it. This 
is a hard saying, but nevertheless a simple truth. 
Throughout his journey from the cradle to the 
grave, the Manxman paid tithe on all he inherited, 
on all he had, on all he did, on all his wife did, and 
on all he left behind him. We have the equivalent 
of this in England at the present hour, but it was 
yet more tyrannical, and infinitely more ludicrous, in 
the Isle of Man down to the year 1839. It is only 
vanity and folly and vexation of spirit to quarrel 
with the modern English taxgatherer ; you are sure 
to go the wall, with humiliation and with disgrace. 
It was not always so when taxes were paid in kind. 
There was, at least, the satisfaction of cheating. 
The Manx people could not always deny themselves 
that satisfaction. For instance, they were required 
to pay tithe of herring as soon as the herring boats 
were brought above full sea mark, and there were 
wa} r s of counting known to the fishermen with 
which the black-coated arithmeticians of the Church 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 69 

were not able to cope. A man paid tithe on such 
goods and even such clothes as his wife possessed 
on their wedding day, and young brides became 
wondrous wise in the selection for the vicarage of 
the garments that were out of fashion. A corpse- 
present was demanded over the grave of a dead man 
out of the horses and cattle whereof he died possessed, 
and dying men left verbal wills which consigned their 
broken-winded horses and dry cows to the mercy 
and care of the clergyman. You will not marvel 
much that such dealings led to disputes, sometimes 
to quarrels, occasionally to riots. In my boyhood 
I heard old people over the farm-house fire chuckle 
and tell of various wise doings, to outwit the par- 
son. One of these concerned the oats harvest. 
When the oats were in sheaf, the parson's cart 
came up, driven by the sumner, the parson's 
official servant. The gate of the field was thrown 
open, and honestly and religiously one sheaf out of 
every ten was thrown into the cart. But the hus- 
bandman had been thrifty in advance. The par- 
son's sheaves had all been grouped thick about the 
gate, and they were the shortest, and the thinnest, 
and the blackest, and the dirtiest, and the poorest 
that the field had yielded. Similar were the doings 



70 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. n 

at the digging of the potatoes, but the scenes of 
recrimination which often ensued were usually 
confined to the farmer and the sumner. More 
outrageous contentions with the priest himself some- 
times occurred within the very walls of the church. 
It was the practice to bring tithe of butter and 
cheese and eggs, and lay it on the altar on Sunday. 
This had to be done under pain of exclusion from 
the communion, and that was a penalty most 
grievous to material welfare. So the Manxmen and 
Manxwomen were compelled to go to church much 
as they went to market, with their butter- and egg- 
baskets over their arms. It is a ludicrous picture, 
as one sees it in one's mind's eye, but what comes 
after reaches the extremity of farce. Say the 
scene is Maughold old church, once the temple of 
the saintly hermit. It is Sunday morning, the 
bells are ringing, and Juan-beg-Marry-a-thruss, 
a rascally old skinflint, is coming along with 
a basket. It contains some butter that he could 
not sell at Ramsey market yesterday because it was 
rank, and a few eggs which he knows to be stale 
and addled — the old hen has sat on them, and 
they have brought forth nothing. These he places 
reverently on the altar. But the parson knows 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 71 

Juan, and proceeds to examine his tithe. May I 
take so much liberty with history, and with the 
desecrated old church, as to imagine the scene which 
follows ? 

Priest, pointing contemptuously towards the 
altar : " Juan-beg-Marry-a-thruss, what is this ? " 
" Butter and eggs, so plaze your reverence." 
" Pig-swill and chalk you mean, man ! " 
" Aw 'deed if I'd known your reverence was so 
morthal partic'lar the ould hen herself should have 
been layin* some fresh eggs for your reverence." 

" Take them away, you thief of the Church ! 
Do you think what isn't fit for your pig is good 
enough for your priest ? Bring better, or never let 
me look on your wizened old wicked face again." 

Exit Juan-beg-Marry-a-thruss, perhaps with butter 
and eggs flying after his retreating figure. 

The Gambling Bishop 

This is an imaginary picture, but no less outrageous 
things happened whereof the records remain. A 
demoralised laity usually co-exists with a demoral- 
ised clergy, and there are some bad stories of the 
Bishops who preceded the Reformation. There is 



72 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

one story of a Bishop of that period, who was a gross 
drunkard and notorious gambler. He played with 
his clergy as long as they had anything to lose, and 
then he played with a deemster and lost five hundred 
pounds himself. Poor little island, that had two 
such men for its masters, the one its master in 
the things of this world, the other its master in the 
things of the world to come ! If anything is need- 
ful to complete the picture of wretchedness in which 
the poor Manx people must have existed then, it is 
the knowledge of what manner of man a deemster 
was in those days, what his powers were, and how 
he exercised them. 

The Deemsters 

The two deemsters — a name of obvious sig- 
nificance, deem-sters, such as deem the laws — 
were then the only judges of the island, all other 
legal functionaries being of more recent date. On 
entering into office, the deemster took an oath, 
which is sworn by all deemsters to this day, 
declaring by the wonderful works which God hath 
miraculously wrought in six days and seven nights, 
that he would execute the laws of the island justly 



r.Ec-r. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 73 

" betwixt party and party, as indifferently as the 
herring's backbone doth lie in the midst of the 
fish." But these laws down to the time of the 
second Stanley existed only in the breasts of the 
deemsters themselves, being therefore called Breast 
Laws, and thus they were supposed to be handed 
down orally from deemster to deemster. The 
superstition fostered corruption as well as incapacity, 
and it will not be wronging the truth to say that 
some of the deemsters of old time were both ignorant 
and unprincipled. Their jurisdiction was absolute 
in all that were then thought to be temporal affairs, 
beginning with a debt of a shilling, and going up to 
murder. They kept their courts in the centres of 
their districts, one of them being in the north of the 
island, the other in the south, but they were free 
to hold a court anywhere, and at any time. A 
deemster riding from Ramsey to Peel might find 
his way stopped by a noisy claimant, who held his 
defendant by the lug, having dragged him bodily from 
the field to the highway, to receive instant judg- 
ment from the judge riding past. Or at midnight, 
in his own home, a deemster might be broken in 
upon by a clamorous gang of disputants and their 
witnesses, who came from the pot-house for the 



74 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [mct. 11 

settlement of their differences. On such occasions, 
the deemster invariably acted on the sound old 
legal maxim, once recognised by an Act of Parlia- 
ment, that suits not likely to bear good costs should 
always be settled out of court. First, the deemster 
demanded his fee. If neither claimant nor defend- 
ant could give it, he probably troubled himself no 
further than to take up his horse-whip and drive 
both out into the road. I dare say there were 
many good men among deemsters of the old order, 
who loved justice for its own sake, and liked to see 
the poor and the weak righted, but the memory of 
deemsters of this kind is not green. The bulk 
of men are not better than their opportunities, and 
the temptations of the deemsters of old were neither 
£ew nor slight. 

The Bishopric Vacant 

With such masters in the State, and such 
masters in the Church, the island fell low in 
material welfare, and its poverty reacted on both. 
Within fifty years the Bishopric was nineteen years 
vacant, though it may be that at the beginning of the 
seventeenth century this was partly due to religious 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 75 

disturbances. Then in 1697, w i tn tne monasteries 
and nunneries dispersed, the abbeys in ruins, the 
cathedral church a wreck, the clergy sunk in sloth 
and ignorance, there came to the Bishopric, four 
years vacant, a true man whose name on the page 
of Manx Church history is like a star on a 
dark night, when only one is shining — Bishop 
Thomas Wilson. He was a strange and complex 
creature, half angel, only half man, the serenest of 
saints, and yet almost the bitterest of tyrants. Let 
me tell you about him. 

Bishop Wilson 

Thomas Wilson was from Trinity College, 
Dublin, and became domestic chaplain to William, 
Earl of Derby, and preceptor to the Earl's son, 
who died young. While he held this position, 
the Bishopric of Sodor and Man became vacant, 
and it was offered to him. He declined it, think- 
ing himself unworthy of so high a trust. The 
Bishopric continued vacant. Perhaps the can- 
didates for it were few ; certainly the emoluments 
were small ; perhaps the patron was slothful — 
certainly he gave little attention to the Church. At 



76 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [user, n 

length complaint was made to the King that the 
spiritual needs of the island were being neglected. 
The Earl was commanded to fill the Bishopric, and 
once again he offered it to his chaplain. Then 
Wilson yielded. He took possession in 1698, and 
was enthroned at Peel Castle. The picture of his 
enthronement must have been something to remem- 
ber. Peel Castle was already tumbling to its fall, and 
the cathedral church was a woful wreck. It is 
even said that from a hole in the roof the soil and 
rain could enter, and blades of grass were shooting 
up on the altar. The Bishop's house at Kirk 
Michael, which had been long shut up, was in a 
similar plight ; damp, mouldy, broken-windowed, 
green with moss within and without. What would 
one give to turn back the centuries and look on 
at that primitive ceremony in St. Germain's Chapel 
in April 1698 ! There would be the clergy, a 
sorry troop, with wise and good men among them, 
no doubt, but a poor, battered, bedraggldd, 
neglected lot, chiefly learned in dubious arts of 
collecting tithes. And the Bishop himself, the 
good chaplain of Earl Derby, the preceptor of his 
son, what a face he must have had to watch and 
to study, as he stood there that April morning, 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION <j 7 

and saw for the first time what work he had come 
to tackle ! 

Bishop Wilson's Censures 

But Bishop Wilson set about his task with a 
strong heart, and a resolute hand. He found him- 
self in a twofold trust. Since the Reformation, the 
monasteries and nunneries had been dispersed, 
and all the baronies had been broken up, save one, 
the barony of the Bishop. Thus Bishop Wilson 
was the head of the court of his barony. This was 
a civil court with power of jurisdiction over felonies. 
Its separate criminal control came to an end in 1777. 
Such was Bishop Wilson's position as last and sole 
Baron of Man. Then as head of the Church he 
had powers over offences which were once called 
offences against common law. Irregular behaviour, 
cursing, quarrelling, and drinking, as well as trans- 
gressions of the moral code, adultery, seduction, 
prostitution, and the like, were punishable by the 
Church and the Church courts. The censures of 
Bishop Wilson on such offences did not err on the 
side of clemency. He was the enemy of sin, and 
no " rcntle foe of sinners." He was a believer in 



7 8 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. h 

witchcraft, and for suspicion of commerce with evil 
spirits and possession of the evil eye he punished 
many a blameless old body. For open and con- 
victed adultery he caused the offenders to stand for 
an hour at high fair at each of the market-places 
of Douglas,. Peel, Ramsey, and Castletown, bearing 
labels on their breasts calling on all people to take 
warning lest they came under the same Church cen- 
sure. Common unchastity he punished by expo- 
sure in church at full congregation, when the 
guilty man or the poor victimised girl stepped up 
from the west porch to the altar, covered from neck 
to heels in a white sheet. Slanderers and evil 
speakers he clapped into the Peel, or perhaps the 
whipping-stocks, with tongue in a noose of leather, 
and when after a lapse of time the gag was re- 
moved the liberated tongue was obliged to denounce 
itself by saying thrice, clearly, boldly, probably with 
good accent and discretion, " False tongue, thou 
hast lied.' 

It is perhaps as well that some of us did not live 
in Bishop Wilson's time. We might not have 
lived long. If the Church still held and exercised 
the same powers over evil speakers we should 
never hear our own ears in the streets for the din 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION ^9 

of the voices of the penitents ; and if it still 
punished unchastity in a white sheet the trade of 
the linen weaver would be brisk. 

You will say that I have justified my statement 
that Bishop Wilson was the bitterest of tyrants. 
Let me now establish my opinion that he was also 
the serenest of saints. I have told you how low 
was the condition of the Church, how lax its rule, 
how deep its clergy lay in sloth and ignorance, and 
perhaps also in vice, when Bishop Wilson came to 
Man in 1698. Well, in 1703, only five years later, 
the Lord Chancellor King said this : " If the an- 
cient discipline of the Church were lost elsewhere it 
might be found in all its force in the Isle of Man." 
This points first to force and vigour on the Bishop's 
part, but surely it also points to purity of character 
and nobility of aim. Bishop Wilson began by 
putting his own house in order. His clergy ceased 
to gamble and to drink, and they were obliged to 
collect their tithes with mercy. He once suspended 
a clergyman for an opinion on a minor point, but 
many times he punished his clergy for offences 
against the moral law and the material welfare of 
the poor. In a stiff fight for integrity of life and 
purity of thought, he spared none. I truly believe 



80 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.ii 

that if he had caught himself in an act of gross in- 
justice he would have clambered up into the pillory. 
He was a brave, strong-hearted creature, of the build 
of a great man. Yes ! In spite of all his contradic- 
tions, he was a great man. We Manxmen shall 
never look upon his like again ! 

The Great Corn Famine 

Towards 1740 a long and terrible corn famine 
fell upon our island. The fisheries had failed that 
season, and the crops had been blighted two years 
running. Miserably poor at all times, ill-clad, ill- 
housed, ill-fed at the best, the people were in 
danger of sheer destitution. In that day of their 
bitter trouble the poorest of the poor trooped off to 
Bishop's court. The Bishop threw open his house 
to them all, good and bad, improvident and thrifty, 
lazy and industrious, drunken and sober ; he made 
no distinctions in that bad hour. He asked no 
man for his name who couldn't give it, no woman 
for her marriage lines who hadn't got them, no 
child whether it was born in wedlock. That they 
were all hungry was all he knew, and he saved 
their lives in thousands. He bought ship-loads or 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 8l 

English corn and served it out in bushels ; also 
tons of Irish potatoes, and served them out in 
kischcns. He gave orders that the measure was to 
De piled as high as it would hold, and never 
smoothed flat again. Yet he was himself a poor 
man. While he had money he spent it. When 
every penny was gone he pledged his revenue in 
advance. After his credit was done he begged in 
England for his poor people in Man — he begged for us 
who would not have held out his hat to save his 
own life ! God bless him ! But we repaid him. 
Oh yes, we repaid him. His money he never got 
back, but gold is not the currency of the other 
world. Prayers and blessings are the wealth that 
is there, and these went up after him to the great 
White Throne from the swelling throats of his 
people. 

The Bishop at Court 

Not of Bishop Wilson could it be said, as it was 
said of another, that he " flattered princes in the 
temple of God." One day, when he was coming to 
Court, Queen Caroline saw him and said to a com- 
pany of Bishops and Archbishops that surrounded 



82 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

her, " See, my lords, here is a Bishop who does 
not come for a translation." " No, indeed, and 
please your Majesty," said Bishop Wilson, " I will 
not leave my wife in her old age because she is 
poor." When Bishop Wilson was an old man, 
Cardinal Fleury sent over to ask after his age and 
health, saying that they were the two oldest and 
poorest Bishops in the world. At the same time 
he got an order that no French privateer should 
ever ravage the Isle of Man. The order has long 
lapsed, but I am told that to this day French sea- 
men respect a Manxman. It touches me to think of 
it that thus does the glory of this good man's life 
shine on our faces still. 

Stories of Bishop Wilson 

How his people must have loved him ! Many of 
the stories told of him are of rather general applica- 
tion, but some of them ought to be true if they 
are not. 

One day in the old three-cornered market-place 
at Ramsey a little maiden of seven crossed his 
path. She was like sunshine, rosy-cheeked, bright- 
eyed, bare-footed and bare-headed, and for love of 



lzct. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION S3 

her sweetness the grey old Bishop patted her head 
and blest her. " God bless you, my child ; God bless 
you," he said. The child curtseyed and answered, 
" God bless you, too, sir." " Thank you, child, 
thank you," the Bishop said again ; " I dare say your 
blessing will be as good as mine." 

It was customary in those days, and indeed 
down to my own time, when a suit of clothes was 
wanted, to have the journeyman tailor at home to 
make it. One, Danny of that ilk, was once at 
Bishop's Court making a long walking coat for the 
Bishop. In trying it on in its nehulous condition, 
that leprosy of open white seams and stitches, 
Danny made numerous chalk marks to indicate the 
places of the buttons. " No, no, Danny," said the 
Bishop, " no more buttons than enough to fasten it 
— only one, that will do. It would ill become a 
poor priest like me to go a-glitter with things like 
those." Now, Danny had already bought his 
buttons, and had them at that moment in his 
pocket. So, pulling a woful face, he said, " Mercy 
me, my lord, what would happen to the poor button- 
makers, if everybody was of your opinion ? " 
" Button it all over, Danny," said the Bishop. A 
coat of Bishop Wilson's still exists. Would that 



84 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

we had that one of the numerous buttons, and could 
get a few more made of the same pattern ! It would 
be out of fashion — Danny's progeny have taken 
care of that. There are not many of us that it 
would fit — we have few men of Bishop Wilson's 
build nowadays. But human kindliness is never 
old-fashioned, and there are none of us that the 
garment of sweet grace would not suit. 

Quarrels of Church and State 

So far from " flattering princes in the temple of 
God," Bishop Wilson was even morbidly jealous of 
the authority of the Church, and he resisted that of 
the State when the civil powers seemed to encroach 
upon it. More than once he came into collision 
with the State's highest functionary, the Lieutenant- 
Governor, representative of the Lord of Man him- 
self. One day the Governor's wife falsely defamed 
a lady, and the lady appealed to the Bishop. 
Thereupon the Bishop interdicted the Governor's 
wife from receiving the communion. But the 
Governor's chaplain admitted her. Straightway the 
Bishop suspended the Governor's chaplain. Then 
the Governor fined the Bishop in the sum of. fifty 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION S5 

pounds. The Bishop refused to pay, and was com- 
mitted to Castle Rushen, and lay there two months. 
They show us his cell, a poor, dingy little box, so 
damp in his day that he lost the use of some of 
his fingers. After that the Bishop appealed to the 
Lord, who declared the imprisonment illegal. The 
Bishop was liberated, and half the island went to 
the prison gate to fetch him forth in triumph. The 
only result was that the Bishop lost ^"500, whereof 
,£300 were subscribed by the people. One hardly 
knows whether to laugh or cry at it all. It is a 
sorry and silly farce. Of course it made a tremen- 
dous hurly-burly in its day, but it is gone now, and 
doesn't matter a ha'porth to anybody. Nevertheless 
because' Gessler's cap goes up so often nowadays, 
and so many of us are kneeling to it, it is good and 
wholesome to hear of a poor Bishop who was brave 
enough to take a shot at it instead. 

Some Old Ordeals 

Notwithstanding Bishop Wilson's severity, his 
tyranny, his undue pride in the authority of the 
Church, and his morbid jealousy of the powers of 
the State, his rule was a wise and just one, and he 



86 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [i.ect. n 

was a spiritual statesman, who needed not to be 
ashamed. He raised the tone of life in the Isle of 
Man, made it possible to accept a man's yea and 
nay, even in those perilous issues of life where the 
weakness and meanness of poor humanity reveals 
itself in lies and subterfuges. This he did by- 
making false swearing a terror. One ancient 
ordeal of swearing he set his face against, but 
another he encouraged, and often practised. Let 
me describe both. 

In the old days, when a man died intestate, 
leaving no record of his debts, a creditor might 
establish a claim by going with the Bishop to the 
grave of .he dead man at midnight, stretching him- 
self on it with face towards heaven and a Bible on 
his breast, and then saying solemnly, " I swear that 
So-and-so, who lies buried here, died in my debt by 
so much." After that the debt was allowed. What 
warning the Bishop first pronounced I do not know, 
but the scene is a vivid one, even if we think of the 
creditor as swearing truly, and a startling and 
terrible one if we think of him as about to swear 
to what is false. The dark night, the dark figures 
moving in it, the churchyard, the debtor's grave, the 
sham creditor, who had been loud in his protests 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 87 

under the light of the inn of the village, now- 
quaking and trembling as the Bishop's warning 
comes out of the gloom, then stammering, and 
breaking down, and finally, with ghostly visions of 
a dead hand clutching at him from the grave, 
starting up, shrieking, and flying away. It is a 
nightmare. Let us not- remember it when the 
candles are put out. 

This ordeal was in force until the seventeenth 
century, but Bishop Wilson judged it un-Christian, 
and never practised it. The old Roman canon law 
of Purgation, a similar ordeal, he used not rarely. 
It was designed to meet cases of slander in which 
there was no direct and positive evidence. If a 
good woman had been accused of unchastity in that 
vague way of rumour which is always more 
damaging and devilish than open accusation, she 
might of her own free choice, or by compulsion of 
the Bishop, put to silence her false accusers by 
appearing in church, with witnesses ready to take 
oath that they believed her, and there swearing at 
the altar that common fame and suspicion had 
wronged her. If a man doubted her word he had 
to challenge it, or keep silence for ever after. The 
severest censures of the Church were passed upon 



SS THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.ii 

those who dared to repeat an unproved accusation 
after the oaths of Purgation and Compurgation had 
been taken unchallenged. It is a fine, honest 
ordeal, very old, good for the right, only bad for 
the wrong, giving strength to the weak and 
humbling the mighty. But it would be folly and 
mummery in our day. The Church has lost its 
powers over life and limb, and no one capable of 
defaming a pure woman would care a brass penny 
about the Church's excommunication. Yet a 
woman's good name is the silver thread that runs 
through the pearl chain of her virtues. Pity that 
nowadays it can be so easily snapped. Conver- 
sation at five o'clock tea is enough to do that. The 
ordeal of compulsory Purgation was abolished in 
Man as late as 1737. 

The Herring Fishery 

Bishop Wilson began, or revived, a form of 
service which was so beautiful, so picturesque, and 
withal so Manx- that I regret the loss of scarce any 
custom so much as the discontinuance of this one. 
It was the fishermen's service on the shore at the 
beginning of the herring-season. But in order to 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION S9 

appreciate it you must first know something of the 
herring fishing itself. It is the chief industry of 
the island. Half the population is connected with 
it in some way. A great proportion of the men of 
the humbler classes are half seamen, half landsmen, 
tilling their little crofts in the spring and autumn, 
and going out with the herring boats in summer. 
The herring is the national fish. The Manxman 
swears by its flavour. The deemsters, as we have 
seen, literally swear by its backbone. Potatoes 
and herrings constitute a common dish of the 
country people. They are ready for it at any 
hour of the day or night. I have had it for 
dinner, I have taken it for supper, I have seen it 
for tea, and even known it for breakfast. It is 
served without ceremony. In the middle of the 
table two great crocks, one of potatoes boiled in 
their jackets, the other of herrings fresh or salted ; 
a plate and a bowl of new milk at every seat, and 
lumps of salt here and there. To be a Manxman 
you must eat Manx herrings ; there is a story that 
to transform himself into a Manxman one of the 
Dukes of Athol ate twenty-four of them at break- 
fast, a herring for every member of his House 
of Keys. 



90 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. n 

The Manx herring fishery is interesting and very 
picturesque. You know that the herrings come 
from northern latitudes. Towards mid-winter a 
vast colony of them set out from the arctic seas, 
closely pursued by innumerable sea-fowl, which deal 
death among the little emigrants. They move in 
two divisions, one westward towards the coasts of 
America, the other eastward in the direction of 
Europe. They reach the Shetlands in April and 
the Isle of Man about June. The herring is fished 
at night. To be out with the herring boats is a 
glorious experience on a calm night. You have set 
sail with the fleet of herring boats about sun-down, 
and you are running before a light breeze through 
the dusk. The sea-gulls are skimming about the 
brown sails of your boat. They know what you 
are going to do, and have come to help you. 
Presently you come upon a flight of them wheeling 
and diving in the gathering darkness. Then you 
know that you have lit on the herring shoal. The 
boat is brought head to the wind and left to drift. 
By this time the stars are out, perhaps the moon 
also — though too much moon is not good for the 
fishing — and you can just descry the dim outline 
of the land against the dark blue of the sky. 



lkt.ii] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 91 

Luminous patches of phosphorescent light begin to 
move in the water. " The mar-fire's rising/' say 
the fishermen, the herring are stirring. " Let's 
make a shot ; up with the gear," cries the skipper, 
and nets are hauled from below, passed over the 
bank-board, and paid out into the sea— a solid wall 
of meshes, floating upright, nine feet deep and a 
quarter of a mile long. It is a calm, clear night, 
just light enough to see the buoys on the back of 
the first net. The lamp is fixed on the mitch-board. 
All is silence, only the steady plash, plash, plash of 
the slow waters on the boat's side ; no singing 
among the men, no chaff, no laughter, all quiet 
aboard, for the fishermen believe that the fish can 
hear ; all quiet around, where the deep black of the 
watery pavement is brightened by the reflection of 
stars. Then out of the white phosphorescent 
patches come minute points of silver and countless 
faint popping sounds. The herrings are at play 
about the nets. You see them in numbers exceed- 
ing imagination, shoals on shoals. " Pull up now, 
there's a heavy strike," cries the skipper, and the 
nets are hauled up, and come in white and moving 
— a solid block of fish, cheep, cheep, cheeping like 
birds in the early morning. At the grey of dawn 



92 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

the boats begin to run for home, and the sun is 
shining as the fleet makes the harbour. Men and 
women are waiting there to buy the night's catch. 
The quay is full of them, bustling, shouting, 
laughing, quarrelling, counting the herrings, and 
so forth. 

The Fishermen's Service 

Such is the herring fishery of Man. Bishop 
Wilson knew how bitter a thing it could be if tin's 
industry failed the island even for a single season. 
So, with absolute belief in the Divine government of 
the world, he wrote a Service to be held on the first 
day of the herring season, asking for God's blessing 
on the harvest of the sea. The scene of that 
service must have been wondrously beautiful and 
impressive. Why does not some great painter 
paint it ? Let me, by the less effectual vehicle of 
words, attempt to realise what it must have been. 

The place of it was Peel bay, a wide stretch of 
beach, with a gentle slope to the left, dotted over 
with grey houses ; the little town farther on, v/ith its 
nooks and corners, its blind alleys and dark lanes, 
its narrow, crabbed, crooked streets. Behind this 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 93 

the old pier and the herring boats rocking in the 
harbour, with their brown sails half set, waiting for 
the top of the tide. In the distance the broad 
breast of Contrary Head, and, a musket-shot outside 
of it, the little rocky islet whereon stand the stately 
ruins of the noble old Peel Castle. The beach is 
dotted over with people — old men, in their curranes 
and undyed stockings, leaning on their sticks ; chil- 
dren playing on the shingle ; young women in groups, 
dressed in sickle-shaped white sun-bonnets, and 
with petticoats tucked up ; old women in long blue 
homespun cloaks. But these are only the back- 
ground of the human picture. In the centre of it 
is a wide circle of fishermen, men and boys, of all 
sizes and sorts, from the old Admiral of the herring 
fleet to the lad that helps the cook — rude figures in 
blue and with great sea-boots. They are on their 
knees on the sand, with their knitted caps at their 
rusty faces, and in the middle of them, standing in 
an old broken boat, is the Bishop himself, bare- 
headed, white-headed, with upturned face praying 
for the fishing season that is about to begin. The 
June day is sweet and beautiful, and the sun is 
going down behind the castle. Some sea-gulls are 
disporting on the rock outside, and, save for their 



94 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [i.ect. ii 

jabbering cries, and the boom of the sea from the 
red horizon, and the gentle plash of the wavelets on 
the pebbles of the shore, nothing is heard but the 
slow tones of the Bishop and the fishermen's deep 
Amen. Such was Bishop Wilson's fishermen's 
service. It is gone ; more's the pity. 

Some Old Laws 

The spiritual laws of Man were no dead letters 
when Bishop Wilson presided over its spiritual 
courts. He was good to illegitimate children, 
making them legitimate if their parents married 
within two years of their birth, and often putting 
them on the same level with their less injured 
brothers and sisters where inheritance was in ques- 
tion. But he was unmerciful to the parents them- 
selves. There is one story of his treatment of a 
woman which passes all others in its tyranny. It 
is, perhaps, the only deep stain on his character. 
I thank God that it can never have come to the 
ears of Victor Hugo. Told as Hugo would have 
told it, surely it must have blasted for ever the 
name of a good man. It is the dark story of 
Katherine Kinrade. 



lect. n] TEE LITTLE MANX NATION 95 

Katherine Kinrade 

She was a poor ruin of a woman, belonging to 
Kirk Christ, but wandering like a vagrant over the 
island. The fact of first consequence is, that she 
was only half sane. In the language of the clergy 
of the time, she " had a degree of unsettledness and 
defect of understanding." Thus she was the sort 
of human wreck that the world finds it easy to 
fling away. Katherine fell victim to the sin that 
was not her own. A child was born. The Church 
censured her. She did penance in a white sheet 
at the church doors. But her poor, dull brain had 
no power to restrain her. A second child was 
born. Then the Bishop committed her for twenty- 
one days to his prison at the Peel. Let me tell 
you what the place is like. It is a crypt of the 
cathedral church. You enter it by a little door in 
the choir, leading to a tortuous flight of steep steps 
going down. It is a chamber cut out of the rock 
of the little island, dark, damp, and noisome. A 
small aperture lets in the light, as well as the sound 
of the sea beating on the rocks below. The roof, 
if you could see it in the gloom, is groined and 



9 C THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. n 

ribbed, and above it is the mould of many graves, 
for in the old days bodies were buried in the choir. 
Can you imagine a prison more terrible for any 
prisoner, the strongest man or the bravest soldier ? 
Think of it on a tempestuous iiight in winter. The 
lonely islet rock, with the swift seas rushing around 
it ; the castle half a ruin, its guard-room empty, its 
banqueting hall roofless, its sally port silent ; then 
the cathedral church falling to decay ; and under 
the floor of its choir, where lie the graves of dead 
men, this black, grim, cold cell, silent as the graves 
themselves, save for the roar of the sea as it beats 
in the darkness on the rocks outside ! But that is 
not enough. We have to think of this gloomy pile 
as inhabited on such a night of terrors by only one 
human soul — this poor, bedraggled, sin-laden woman 
with " the defect of understanding." Can anything 
be more awful ? Yet there is worse to follow. 
The records tell us that Katherine Kinrade sub- 
mitted to her punishment " with as much discretion 
as could be expected of the like of her." But 
such punishments do not cleanse the soul that 
is " drenched with unhallowed fire." Perhaps 
Katherine did not know that she was wronged ; 
nevertheless God's image was being trodden out of 
her. She went from bad to worse, became a 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 97 

notorious strumpet, strolled about the island, and 
led " a scandalous life on other accounts." A 
third child was born. Then the Bishop concluded 
that for the honour of the Christian name, " to pre- 
vent her own utter destruction, and for the example 
of others," at imely and thorough reformation must 
be made by a further and severer punishment. It 
was the 15th day of March, and he ordered that on 
the 17th day, being the fair of St. Patrick, at the 
height of the market, the said Katherine Kinrade 
should be taken to Peel Town in charge of the 
general sumner, and the constables and soldiers of 
the garrison, and there dragged after a boat in the 
sea ! Think of it ! On a bitter day in March this 
wretched woman with the " defect of understanding " 
was to be dragged through the sea by a rope tied 
to the tail of a boat ! And if any owner, master, and 
crew of any boat proved refractory by refusing to 
perform this service for the restraining of vice, they 
were to be subject to fine and imprisonment ! When 
St. Patrick's Day came the weather was so stormy 
that no boat could live in the bay, but on St. 
Germain's Day, about the height of the market, the 
censure was performed. After undergoing the 
punishment the miserable soul was apparently 



98 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. n 

penitent, " according to her capacity," took the 
communion, and was " received into the peace of 
the Church." Poor human ruin, defaced image of 
a woman, begrimed and buried soul, unchaste, mis- 
shapen, incorrigible, no "juice of God's distilling" 
ever " dropped into the core of her life," to such 
punishment she was doomed by the tribunal of that 
saintly man, Bishop Thomas Wilson ! She has met 
him at another tribunal since then ; not where she 
has crouched before him, but where she has stood by 
his side. She has carried her great account against 
him, to Him before whom the proudest are as chaff. 

None spake when Wilson stood before 

The Throne; 

And He that sat thereon 
Spake not ; and all the presence-floor 
Burnt deep with blushes, and the angels cast 
Their faces downwards. — Then, at last, 

Awe-stricken, he was ware 

How on the emerald stair 
A woman sat divinely clothed in white, 
And at her knees four cherubs bright, 

That laid 
Their heads within her lap. Then, trembling, he essayed 

To speak — '■ Christ's mother, pity me ! " 

Then answered she, 
" Sir, I am Katherine Kinrade."* 

* Unpublished poem by the author of "Fo'c's'le Yarns." 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 99 

Bishop Wilson's Last Days 

Have I dashed your faith in my hero ? Was he 
indeed the bitterest of tyrants as well as the 
serenest of saints ? Yet bethink you of the other 
good men who have dorte evil deeds ? King David 
and the wife of Uriah, Mahomet and his adopted 
son ; the gallery of memory is hung round with 
many such portraits. Poor humanity, weak at the 
strongest, impure at the purest ; best take it as it 
is, and be content. Remember that a good man's 
vices are generally the excess of his virtues. It was 
so with Bishop Wilson. Remember, too, that it is 
not for what a man does, but for what he means to 
do, that we love him or hate him in the end. And 
in the end the Manx people loved Bishop Wilson, 
and still they bless his memory. 

We have a glimpse of his last days, and it is full 
of tender beauty. True to his lights, simple and 
frugal of life, God-fearing and strong of heart, he 
lived to be old. Very feeble, his beautiful face 
grown mellower even as his heart was softer for 
his many years, tottering on his staff, drooping like 
a white flower, he went in and out among his 

L ifC 



100 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

people, laying his trembling hands on the children's 
heads and blessing them, remembering their fathers 
and their fathers' fathers. Beloved by the young, 
reverenced by the old, honoured by the great, 
worshipped by the poor, living in sweet patience, 
ready to die in hope. His day was done, his 
night was near, and the weary toiler was willing 
to go to his rest. Thus passed some peaceful 
years. He died in I755> an d was followed to his 
grave by the whole Manx nation. His tomb is our 
most sacred shrine. We know his faults, but wc 
do not speak of them there. Call a truce over the 
place of the old man's rest. There he lies, who 
was once the saviour of our people. God bless 
him ! He was our fathers' bishop, and his saintly 
face still shines on our fathers' children. 

The Athol Bishops 

Let me in a last clause attempt a sketch of the 
history of the Manx Church in the century or more 
that has followed Bishop Wilson's death. The 
last fifty years of it are featureless, save for an 
attempt to abolish the Bishopric. This foolish 
effort first succeeded and then failed, and was a 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 101 

poor bit of mummery altogether, ending in nothing 
but waste of money and time, and breath and temper. 
The fifty years immediately succeeding Bishop 
Wilson were full of activity. But so far as the 
Church was concerned, the activity was not always 
wholesome. If religion was kept alive in Man in 
those evil days, and the soul hunger of the poor 
Manx people was satisfied, it was not by the 
masters of the Manx Church, the Pharisees who 
gave alms in the streets to the sound of a trumpet 
going before them, or by the Levites who passed 
by on the other side when a man had fallen among 
thieves. It was partly by dissent, which was begun 
by Wesley in 1775 (after Quakerism had been 
suppressed), and partly by a small minority of the 
Manx clergy, who kept going the early evangeli- 
calism of Newton and Cowper and Cecil — dear, 
sunny, simple-hearted old Manx vicars, who took 
sweet counsel together in their old-fashioned homes, 
where you found grace in all senses of the word , 
purity of soul, the life of the mind, and gentle 
courtliness of manners. 

Bishop Wilson's successor was Doctor Mark 
Hildlesley, in all respects a worthy man. He 
completed the translation of the Scriptures into 



. 



102 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

Manx, which had been begun by his predecessor, 
and established Sunday-schools in Man before they 
had been commenced in any other country. But 
after him came a line of worthless prelates, Dr. 
Richmond, remembered for his unbending haughti- 
ness ; Dr. Mason, disgraced by his debts ; and 
Claudius Cregan, a bishop unfit to be a curate. 
Do you not read between the broad lines of such 
facts ? The Athol dynasty was now some thirty 
years established in Man, and the swashbuckler 
Court of fine gentlemen was in full swing. In that 
costume drama of soiled lace and uproarious 
pleasures, what part did the Church play ? Was it 
that of the man clad in camel's skin, living on 
locusts and wild honey, and calling on the genera- 
tion of revellers to flee from the wrath to come ? 
No ; but that of the lover of cakes and ale. The 
records of this period are few and scanty, but they 
are full enough to show that some of the clergy of 
the Athols knew more of backgammon than of 
theology. While they pandered to the dissolute 
Court they lived under, going the errands of their 
masters in the State, fetching and carrying for 
them, and licking their shoes, they tyrannised over 
the poor ignorant Manx people and fleeced them 



lect. h] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 103 

unmercifully. Perhaps this was in a way only 
natural. Corruption was in the air throughout 
Europe. Dr. Youngs were grovelling for preferments 
at the feet of kings' mistresses, and Dr. Warners 
were kissing the shoebuckles of great ladies for 
sheer love of their faces, plastered red and white. 
The parasites of the Manx clergy were not 'far 
behind some of their English brethren. There is a 
story told of their life among themselves which casts 
lurid light on their character and ways of life. 
It is said that two of the Vicars-general summoned 
a large number of the Manx people to Bishop's 
Court on some business of the spiritual court. 
Many of the people had come long distances, 
chiefly a-foot, without food, and probably without 
money. After a short sitting the court was 
adjourned for dinner. The people had no dinner, 
and they starved. The Vicars-general went into 
the palace to dine with the Bishop. Some hours 
passed. The night was gathering. Then a 
message came out to say that no more business 
could be done that day. Some of the poor people 
were old, and had to travel fifteen miles to their 
homes. The record tells us that the Bishop gave 
his guests " most excellent wine." What of a 



104 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect.ii 

scene like that ? Outside, a sharp day in Spring, 
two score famished folks tramping the glen and the 
gravel-path, the gravel-path and the glen, to and 
fro, to and fro, minute after minute, hour after 
hour. Inside, my lord Bishop, drenched in debt, 
dining with his clergy, drinking " most excellent 
wine " with them, unbending his mighty mind with 
them, exchanging boisterous stories with them, 
jesting with them, laughing with them, until his 
face grows as red as the glowing turf on his hearth. 
Presently a footfall on the gravel, and outside the 
window a hungry, pinched, anxious face looking 
nervously into the room. Then this colloquy : 

"Ah, the court, plague on't, I'd forgotten it." 

"Adjourn it, gentlemen." 

" Wine like yours, my lord, would make a man 
forget Paradise." 

" Sit down again, gentlemen. Juan, go out and 
tell the people to come back to-morrow." 

" Your right good health, my lord ! " 

" And yours, gentlemen both ! " 

Oh, if there is any truth in religion, if this world 
is God's, if a day is coming when the weak shall 
be exalted and the mighty laid low, what a reckon- 
ing they have gone to whose people cried for bread 



lect. n] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 105 

and they gave them a stone ! And if there Is not, 
if the hope is vain, if it is all a sham and a 
mockery, still the justice of this world is sure. 
Where are they now, these parasites ? Their 
game is played out. They are bones and ashes ; 
they are in their forgotten graves. 



THE STORY OF THE MANX PEOPLE 
The Manx Language 

A friend asked me the other day if there was any 
reason why I should not deliver these lectures in 
Manx. I answered that there were just forty good 
and sufficient reasons. The first was that I did 
not speak Manx. Like the wise queen in the story 
of the bells, he then spared me the recital of the 
remaining nine-and-thirty. But there is at least 
one of the number that will appeal strongly to most 
of my hearers. What that is you shall judge for 
yourselves after I have braved the pitfalls of pronun- 
ciation in a tongue I do not know, and given you 
some clauses of the Lord's Prayer in Manx. 

Ayr ain fayns niau. 

(Father our who art in heaven.) 

Caskerick dy row city ennyr.i. 
(Holy be Thy name. ) 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION. 107 

Dy jig dty reeriagh '. 
(Come Thy kingdom.) 

Dty aigney dy row jean t er y thalloo wry te ayns niait. 
(Thy will be done on the eanh even as in heaven.) 

* * * * * * « 

Son dy drag//, as dy bragh, Amen. 
(For ever and ever. Amen.) 

I asked a friend — it was Mr. Wilson Barrett 
— if in its fulness, its fine chest-notes, its force 
and music, this old language did not sound like 
Italian. 

" Well, no," he answered, " it sounds more like 
hard swearing." 

I think you must now understand why the 
greater part of these lectures should be delivered in 
English. 

Manx is a dialect mainly Celtic, and differing 
only slightly from the ancient Scottish Gaelic. I 
have heard my father say that when he was a boy 
in Ramsey, sixty years ago, a Scotch ship came 
ashore on the Carrick, and next morning after the 
wreck a long, lank, bony creature, with bare legs, 
and in short petticoats, came into the market- 
place and played a tune on a little shrieking pair of 
smithy bellows, and then sang a song. It was a 



io8 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi 

Highland piper, and he sang in his Gaelic, but the 
Manx boys and girls who gathered round him 
understood almost every word of his song, though 
they thought his pronunciation bad. Perhaps they 
took him for a poor old Manxman, somehow 
strayed and lost, a sort of Manx Rip Van Winkle 
who had slept a century in Scotland, and thereby 
lost part of his clothes. 

You will wonder that there is not more Norse in 
our language, remembering how much of the Norse 
is in our blood. But the predominance of the 
Celtic is quite natural. Our mothers were Celts, 
speaking Celtic, before our Norse fathers came. 
Was it likely that our Celtic mothers should learn 
much of the tongue of their Norse husbands ? 
Then, is it not our mother, rather than our father, 
who teaches us to speak when we are children ? 
So our Celtic mothers taught us Celtic, and thus 
Celtic became the dominant language of our race. 

Manx Names 

But though our Norse fathers could not impose 
their Norse tongue on their children, they gave them 
Norse names, and to the island they gave Norse 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 109 

place-names. Hence we find that though Manx 
names show a preponderance of the Celtic, yet that 
the Norse are numerous and important. Thus 
we have many dales, fells, garths, and gltylls. Indeed, 
we have many pure Scandinavian surnames and 
place-names. When I was in Iceland I sometimes 
found myself face to face with names which almost 
persuaded me that I was at home in our little 
island of the Irish Sea. There is, for example, a 
Snaefell in Man as well as in Iceland. Then, our 
Norwegian surnames often took Celtic prefixes, such 
as Mac, and thus became Scandio-Gaclic. But 
this is a subject on which I have no right to speak 
with authority. You will find it written down 
with learning and judgment in the good book of 
my friend Mr. A. W. Moore, of Cronkbourne. What 
concerns me more than the scientific aspect of the 
language is its literary character. I seem to realise 
that it was the language of a poetic race. The 
early generations of a people are often poetic. 
They are child-like, and to be like a child is the 
best half of being like a poet. They name their 
places by help of their observatory powers. These 
are fresh and full of wonder, and Nature herself is 
beautiful or strange until man tampers with her. 



iro THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lot. hi 

So when an untaught and uncorrupted mind looks 
upon a new scene and bethinks itself of a name to 
fit it, the name is almost certainly full of charm or 
rugged power. Thus we find in Man such mixed 
Norse and Celtic names as : Booildooholly (Black 
fold of the wood), Douglas (Black stream), Sode- 
rick (South creek), Trollaby (Troll's farm), Gansy 
(Magic isle), Cronk-y-Clagh Bane (Hill of the white 
stone), Cronk-ny-hey (Hill of the grave), Cronk-ny- 
arrey-lhaa (Hill of the day watch). 

Manx Imagination 

This poetic character of the place-names of the 
island is a standing reproach to us as a race. We 
have degenerated in poetic spirit since such names 
were the natural expression of our feelings. I 
tremble to think what our place-names would be if 
we had to make them now. Our few modern 
christenings set my teeth on edge. We are not a 
race of poets. We are the prosiest of the prosy. I 
have never in my life met with any race, except 
Icelanders and Norwegians, who are so completely 
the slave of hard fact. It is astounding how 
difficult the average Manxman finds it to put 



Ill 
line 



lect. m] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 

himself into the mood of the poet. That anythi 
could come out of nothing, that there is such a 
thing as imagination, that any human brother of an 
honest man could say that a thing had been, which 
had not been, and yet not lie— these are bewilder- 
ing difficulties to the modern Manxman. That a 
novel can be false and yet true— that, well that's 
foolishness. I wrote a Manx romance called " The 
Deemster ; " and I did not expect my fellow-country- 
men of the primitive kind to tolerate it for a moment. 
It was merely a fiction, and the true Manxman of the 
old sort only believes in what is true. He does 
not read very much, and when he does read it is 
not novels. But he could not keep his hands off 
this novel, and on the whole, and in the long run, 
he liked it — that is, as he would say, " middling," 
you know ! But there was only one condition on 
which he could take it to his bosom— it must be 
true. There was the rub, for clearly it transgressed 
certain poor little facts that were patent to every- 
body. Never mind, Hall Caine did not know poor 
Man, or somebody had told him wrong. But the 
story itself! The Bishop, Dan, Ewan, Mona, the 
body coming ashore at the Mooragh, the poor boy 
under the curse by the Calf, lord-a-massy, that was 



H2 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [user, in 

thrue as gospel ! What do you think happened ? 
I have got the letters by me, and can show them to 
anybody. A good Manxman wrote to remonstrate 
with me for calling the book a " romance." How 
dare I do so ? It was all true. Another wrote 
saying that maybe I would like to know that in his 
youth he knew my poor hero, Dan Mylrea, well. 
They often drank together. In fact, they were the 
same as brothers. For his part he had often 
warned poor Dan the way he was going. After 
the murder, Dan came to him and gave him the 
knife with which he had killed Ewan. He had got 
it still ! 

Later than the " Deemster," I published another 
Manx romance, "The Bondman." In that book I 
mentioned, without thought of mischief, certain 
names that must have been lying at the back of my 
head since my boyhood. One of them becomes in 
the book the name of an old hypocrite who in the 
end cheats everybody and yet prays loudly in 
public. Now it seems that there is a man up in 
the mountains who owns that name. When he first 
encountered it in the newspapers, where the story 
was being published as a serial, he went about 
saying he was in the " Bondman," that it was all 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 113 

thrue as gospel, so it was, that he knew me 
when I was a boy, over Ramsey way, and used to 
give me rides on his donkey, so he did. This was 
before the hypocrite was unmasked ; and when that 
catastrophe occurred, and his villany stood naked 
before all the island, his anger knew no limits. I 
am told that he goes about the mountains now like a 
thunder-cloud, and that he wants to meet me. I 
had never heard of the man before in all my 

life. 

What I say is true omy of the typical Manxman, 
the natural-man among Manxmen, not of the Manx- 
man who is Manxman plus man of the world, the 
educated Manxman, who finds it as easy as any- 
body else to put himself into a position of sympathy 
with works of pure imagination. But you must go 
down to the turf if you want the true smell of the 
earth. Education levels all human types, as love is 
said to level all ranks ; and to preserve your individu- 
ality and yet be educated seems to want a strain 
of genius, or else a touch of madness. 

The Manx must have been the language of a 
people with few thoughts to express, but such 
thoughts as they had were beautiful in their 
simplicity and charm, sometimes wise and shrewd, 

H 



114 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi 

and not rarely full of feeling. Thus laa-noo is old 
Manx for child, and it means literally half saint — 
a sweet conception, which says the best of all that 
is contained in Wordsworth's wondrous " Ode on 
the Intimations of Immortality." Laa-bee is old 
Manx for bed, literally half-meat, a profound com- 
mentary on the value of rest. The old salutation 
at the door of a Manx cottage before the visitor 
entered was this word spoken from the porch : Vel 
peccaghs thie ? Literally : Any sinner within ? 
All humanity being sinners in the common speech 
of the Manx people. 

Manx Proverbs 

Nearly akin to the language of a race are its 
proverbs, and some of the Manx proverbs are wise, 
witty, and racy of the soil. Many of them are the 
common possession of all peoples. Of such kind 
is " There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the 
lip." Here is one which sounds like an Eastern 
saying : " Learning is fine clothes for the rich man, 
and riches for the poor man." But I know of no 
foreign parentage for a proverb like this : " A green 
hill when far away ; bare, bare when it is near." 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 115 

That may be Eastern also. It hints of a long 
weary desert ; no grass, no water, and then the 
cruel mirage that breaks down the heart of the 
wayfarer at last. On the other hand, it is not out 
of harmony with the landscape of Man, where the 
mountains look green sometimes from a distance 
when they are really bare and stark, and so typify 
that waste of heart when life is dry of the moisture 
of hope, and all the world is as a parched wilder- 
ness. However, there is one proverb which is so 
Manx in spirit that I could almost take oath on its 
paternity, so exactly does it fit the religious temper 
of our people, though it contains a word that must 
strike an English ear as irreverent : " When one 
poor man helps another poor man, God himself 
laughs." 

Manx Ballads 

Next to the proverbs of a race its songs are the 
best expression of its spirit, and though Manx songs 
are few, some ot them are full of Manx character. 
Always their best part is the air. A man called 
Barrow compiled the Manx tunes about the begin- 
ning of the century, but his book is scarce. In 



u6 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. in 

my ignorance of musical science I can only tell 
you how the little that is left of Manx music lives 
in the ear of a man who does not know one note 
from another. Much of it is like a wail of the 
wind in a lonely place near to the sea, sometimes 
like the soughing of the long grass, sometimes like 
the rain whipping the panes of a window as with 
rods. Nearly always long-drawn like a moan 
rarely various, never martial, never inspiriting, 
often sad and plaintive, as of a people kept under, 
but loving liberty, poor and low down, but with 
souls alive, looking for something, and hoping on, — 
full of the brine, the salt foam, the sad story of the 
sea. Nothing would give you a more vivid sense 
of the Manx people than some of our old airs. 
They would seem to take you into a little white- 
washed cottage with sooty rafters and earthen 
floor, where an old man who looks half like a 
sailor and half like a landsman is dozing before a 
peat fire that is slumbering out. Have I in my 
musical benightedness conveyed an idea of anything 
musical ? If not, let me, by the only vehicle 
natural to me, give you the rough-shod words of 
one or two of our old ballads. There is a ballad, 
much in favour, called Ny kirree fo fiiaghtey, tnc 



lect. m] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 117 

Sheep under the Snow. Another, yet better known, 
is called Myle Charaine. This has sometimes been 
called the Manx National Air, but that is a fiction. 
The song has nothing to do with the Manx as a 
nation. Perhaps it is merely a story of a miser 
and his daughter's dowry. Or perhaps it tells of 
pillage, probably of wrecking, basely done, and of 
how the people cut the guilty one off from all inter- 
course with them. 

O, Myle Charaine, where got you your gold ? 

Lone, lone, you have left me here. 
O, not in the curragh, deep under the mould, 

Lone, lone, and void of cheer. 

This sounds poor enough, but it would be hard 
to say how deeply this ballad, wedded to its wailing 
music, touches and moves a Manxman. Even to my 
ear as I have heard it in Manx, it has seemed to be 
one of the weirdest things in old ballad literature, 
only to be matched by some of the old Irish songs, 
and by the gruesome ditty which tells how " the 
sun shines fair on Carlisle wa\" 



Il8 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. m 

Manx Carols 

The paraphrase I have given you was done by 
George Borrow, who once visited the island. My 
friend the Rev. T. E. Brown met him and showed 
him several collections of Manx carols, and he 
pronounced them all translations from the English, 
not excepting our famous Drogh Vraanc, or carol 
of every bad woman whose story is told in the 
Bible, beginning with the story of mother Eve 
herself. And, indeed, you will not be surprised that 
to the shores of our little island have drifted all 
kinds of miscellaneous rubbish, and that the Manx- 
men, from their very simplicity and ignorance of 
other literatures, have had no means of sifting the 
flotsam and assigning value to the constituents. 
Besides this, they are so irresponsible, have no 
literary conscience, and accordingly have appro- 
priated anything and everything. This is true of 
some Manx ballads, and perhaps also of many Manx 
carols. The carols, called Carvals in Manx, serve 
in Man, as in other countries, the purpose of cele- 
brating the birth of Jesus, but we have one ancient 
custom attached to them which we can certainly 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 119 

claim for our own, so Manx is it, so quaint, so 
grimly serious, and withal so howlingly ludicrous. 

It is called the service of Oiel Verree, probably a 
corruption of Feaill Vorrey, literally the Feast of 
Mary, and it is held in the parish church near 
to midnight on Christmas Eve. Scott describes it 
in " Peveril of the Peak," but without personal 
knowledge. 

Services are still held in many churches on 
Christmas Eve ; and I think they are called Oiel 
Verree, but the true Oiel Verree, the real, pure, 
savage, ridiculous, sacrilegious old Oiel Verree, is 
gone. I myself just came in time for it ; I saw the 
last of it, nevertheless I saw it at its prime, for 
I saw it when it was so strong that it could not 
live any longer. Let me tell you what it was. 

The story carries me back to early boyish years, 
when, from the lonely school-house on the bleak 
top of Maughold Head, I was taken in secret, one 
Christmas Eve, between nine and ten o'clock, to the 
old church of Kirk Maughold, a parish which longer 
than any other upheld the rougher traditions. My 
companion was what is called an original. His 
name was Billy Corkill. We were great chums. 
I would be thirteen, he was about sixty. Billy 



120 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. in 

lived alone in a little cottage on the high-road, and 
worked in the fields. He had only one coat all the 
years I knew him. It seemed to have been blue 
to begin with, but when it had got torn Billy had 
patched it with anything that was handy, from green 
cloth to red flannel. He called it his Joseph's coat 
of many colours. Billy was a poet and a musical 
composer. He could not read a word, but he 
would rather have died than confess his ignorance. 
He kept books and newspapers always about him, 
and when he read out of them, he usually held 
them upside down. If any one remarked on that, 
he said he could read them any way up — that was 
where his scholarship came in. Billy was a great 
carol singer. He did not know a note, but he 
never sang except from music. His tunes were 
wild harmonies that no human ear ever heard 
before. It will be clear to you that old Billy was a 
man of genius. 

Such was my comrade on that Christmas Eve 
long ago. It had been a bitter winter in the Isle 
of Man, and the ground was covered with snow- 
But the church bells rang merrily over the dark 
moorland, for Oiel Verree was peculiarly the 
people's service, and the ringers were ringing in the 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 121 

one service of the } r ear at which the parishioners 
supplanted the Vicar, and appropriated the old 
parish church. In spite of the weather, the church 
was crowded with a motley throng, chiefly of young 
folks, the young men being in the nave, and the 
girls (if I remember rightly) in the little loft at the 
west end. Most of the men carried tallow dips, 
tied about with bits of ribbon in the shape of 
rosettes, duly lighted, and guttering grease at inter- 
vals on to the book-ledge or the tawny fingers 
of them that held them. It appeared that there 
had been an ordinary service before we arrived, 
and the Vicar was still within the rails of the com- 
munion. From there he addressed some parting 
words of solemn warning to the noisy throng of 
candle-carriers. As nearly as I can remember, the 
address was this : " My good people, you are 
about to celebrate an old custom. For my part, I 
have no S3onpathy with such customs, but since the 
hearts of my parishioners seem to be set on this 
one, I have no wish to suppress it. But tumultuous 
and disgraceful scenes have occurred on similar 
occasions in previous years, and I beg you to 
remember that you are in God's house," &c. 
&c. The grave injunction was listened to in silence, 



122 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. ii 

and when it ended, the Vicar, a worthy but not 
very popular man, walked towards the vestry. To 
do so, he passed the pew where I sat under the left 
arm of my companion, and he stopped before him, 
for Billy had long been a notorious transgressor at 
Oiel Verree. 

"See that you do not disgrace my church to-night," 
said the Vicar. But Billy had a biting tongue. 

"Aw, well," said he, " I'm thinking the church 
is the people's." 

li The people are as ignorant as goats," said the 
Vicar. 

" Aw, then," said Billy, " you are the shepherd, 
so just make sheeps of them." 

At that the Vicar gave us the light of his coun- 
tenance no more. The last glimpse of his robe 
going through the vestry door was the signal for a 
buzz of low gossip, and straightway the business of 
Oiel Verree began. 

It must have been now approaching eleven 
o'clock, and two old greybeards with tousled heads 
placed themselves abreast at the door of the west 
porch. There they struck up a carol in a some- 
what lofty key. It was a most doleful ditty. 
Certainly I have never since heard the like of it. I 
remember that it told the story of the Crucifixion in 



lect. m] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 123 

startling language, full of realism that must have 
been horribly ghastly, if it had not been so 
comic. At the end of each verse the singers made 
one stride towards the communion. There were 
some thirty verses, and every mortal verse did 
these zealous carollers give us. They came to an 
end at length, and then another old fellow rose in 
his pew and sang a ditty in Manx. It told of the 
loss of the herring-fleet in Douglas Bay in the last 
century. After that there was yet another and 
another carol — some that might be called sacred, 
others that would not be badly wronged with the 
name of profane. As I recall them now, they were 
full of a burning earnestness, and pictured the 
dangers of the sinner and the punishment of the 
damned. They said nothing about the joys of 
heaven, or the pleasures of life. Wherever these 
old songs came from they must have dated from 
some period of religious revival. The Manxman 
may have appropriated them, but if he did so he 
was in a deadly earnest mood. It must have been 
like stealing a hat-band. 

My comrade had been silent all this time, but in 
response to various winks, nods, and nudges, he 
rose to his feet. Now, in prospect of Oiel Verree I 
had written the old man a brand new carol. It 



124 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. m 

was a mighty achievement in the sentimental vein. 
I can remember only one of its couplets : 

Hold your souls in still communion, 
Blend them in a holy union. 

I am not very sure what this may mean, and 
Billy must have been in the same uncertainty. 
Shall I ever forget what happened ? Billy standing 
in the pew with my paper in his hand the wrong 
way up. Myself by his side holding a candle to 
him. Then he began to sing. It was an awful 
tune — I think he called it sevens — but he made 
common-sense of my doggerel by one alarming 
emendation. When he came to the couplet I have 
given you, what do you think he sang ? 

" Hold your souls in still communion, 
Blend them in — a hollow onion ! " 

Billy must have been a humorist. He is long 
dead, poor old Billy. God rest him ! 



Decay of the Manx Language 

If in this unscientific way I have conveyed my 
idea of Manx carvals, Manx ballads, or Manx pro- 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 125 

verbs, you will not be surprised to hear me say that 
I do not think that any of these can live long apart 
from the Manx language. We may have stolen most 
of them ; they may have been wrecked on our coast, 
and we may have smuggled them ; but as long as 
they wear our native homespun clothes they are 
ours, and as soon as they put it off they cease to 
belong to us. A Manx proverb is no longer a 
Manx proverb when it is in English. The same is 
true of a Manx ballad translated, and of a Manx 
carval turned into an English carol. What belongs 
to us, our way of saying things, in a word, our 
style, is gone. The spirit is departed, and that 
which remains is only an English ghost flitting 
about in Manx grave-clothes. 

Now this is a sad fact, for it implies that little as 
we have got of Manx literature, whether written or 
oral, we shall soon have none at all. Our Manx 
language is fast dying out. If we had any great 
work in the Manx tongue, that work alone would 
serve to give our language a literary life at least. 
But we have no such great work, no fine Manx 
poem, no good novel in Manx, not even a Manx 
sermon of high mark. Thus far our Manx language 
has kept alive our pigmies of Manx literature ; but 



126 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi 

both are going down together. The Manx is not 
much spoken now. In the remoter villages, like 
Cregnesh, Ballaugh, Kirk Michael, and Kirk 
Andreas, it may still be heard. Moreover, the 
Manxman may hear Manx a hundred times for 
every time an Englishman hears it. But the 
younger generation of Manx folk do not speak 
Manx, and very often do not understand it. This 
is a rapid change on the condition of things in my 
own boyhood. Manx is to me, for all practical 
uses, an unknown tongue. I cannot speak it, I 
cannot follow it when spoken, I have only a sort of 
nodding acquaintance with it out of door, and yet 
among my earliest recollections is that of a house- 
hold where nothing but Manx was ever spoken 
except to me. A very old woman, almost bent 
double over a spinning wheel, and calling me 
Hommy-Veg, and baugh-millish, and so forth. This 
will suggest that the Manx people are themselves 
responsible for the death of the Manx language. 
That is partly true. The Manx tongue was felt to 
be an impediment to intercourse with the English 
people. Then the great English immigration set in, 
and the Isle of Man became a holiday resort. That 
was the doomster of the Manx language. In 



kct.iii] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 127 

another five-and-twenty years the Manx language 
will be as dead as a Manx herring. 

One cannot but regret this certain fate. I dare 
not say that the language itself is so good that it 
ought to live. Those who know it better say that 
" it's a fine old tongue, rich and musical, full of 
meaning and expression."* I know that it is at 
least forcible, and loud and deep in sound. I will 
engage two Manxmen quarrelling in Manx to make 
more noise in a given time than any other two 
human brethren in Christendom, not excepting two 
Irishmen. Also I think the Manx must be capable 
of notes of sweet feeling, and I observe that a 
certain higher lilt in a Manx woman's voice, 
suggesting the effort to speak about the sound of 
the sea, and the whistle of the wind in the gorse, is 
lost in the voices of the younger women who speak 
English only. But apart fiom tangible loss, I 
regret the death of the Manx tongue on grounds of 
sentiment. In this old tongue our fathers played 
as children, bought and sold as men, prayed, 
preached, gossiped, quarrelled, and made love. It 
was their language at Tynwald ; they sang their 
grim carvals in it, and their wailing, woful ballads. 
* The Rev. T. E. Brown. 



128 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. in 

When it is dead more than half of all that makes 
us Manxmen will be gone. Our individuality will 
be lost, the greater barrier that separates us from 
other peoples will be broken down. Perhaps this 
may have its advantages, but surely it is not 
altogether a base desire not to be submerged into 
all the races of the earth. The tower of Babel is 
built, the tongues of the builders are confounded, 
and we are not all anxious to go back and join the 
happy family that lived in one ark. 

But aside from all lighter thoughts there is 
something very moving and pathetic in the death of 
an old language. Permit me to tell you, not as a 
philologist, a character to which I have no claim, 
but as an imaginative writer, how the death of an 
ancient tongue affects me. It is unlike any other 
form of death, for an unwritten language is even as 
a breath of air which when it is spent leaves no 
trace behind. A nation may die, yet its history 
remains, and that is the tangible part of it-*! past. 
A city may fall to decay and lie a thousand years 
under the sands of the desert, yet its relics revivify 
its life. But a language that is dead, a tongue 
that has no life in its literature, is a breath of wind 
that is gone. A little while and it went from lip to 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 129 

lip, from lip to ear ; it came we know not whence ; 
it has passed we know not where. It was an 
embodied spirit of all man's joys and sorrows, and 
like a spirit it has vanished away. 

Then if this old language has been that of our 
own people its death is a loss to our affections. 
Indeed, language gets so close to our heart that we 
can hardly separate it from our emotions. If you 
do not speak the Italian language, ask youiself 
whether Dante comes as close to you as Shake- 
speare, all questions of genius and temperament 
apart. And if Dante seems a thousand miles 
away, and Shakespeare enters into your closest 
chamber, is it not first of all because the language 
of Shakespeare is your own language, alive with 
the life that is in your own tongue, vital with your 
own ways of thought and even tricks and whims of 
speech? Let English die, and Shakespeare goes 
out of your closet, and passes away from you, and is 
then your brother-Englishman only in name. So close 
is the bond of language, so sweet and so mysterious. 
But there is yet a more sacred bond with the 
language of our fathers when it can have no pos- 
thumous life in books. This is the bond of love. 
Think what it is that you miss first and longest 



1 



130 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. in 

when death robs you of a friend. Is it not the 
living voice ? The living face you can bring back 
in memory, and in your dark hours it will shine on 
you still ; the good deed can never die ; the noble 
thought lives for ever. Death is not conqueror 
over such as these, but the human voice, the 
strange and beautiful part of us that is half spirit 
in life, is lost in death. For a while it startles us 
as an echo in an empty chamber, and then it is 
gone, and not all the world's wealth could bring 
one note of it back. And such as the vanishing 
away of the voice of the friend we loved is the 
death of the old tongue which our fathers spoke. 
It is the death of the dead. 

Manx Superstitions 

When the Manx tongue is dead there will remain, 
however, just one badge of our race — our supersti- 
tion. I am proud to tell you that we are the most 
superstitious people now left among the civilised 
nations of the world. This is a distinction in these 
days when that poetry of life, as Goethe names it, 
is all but gone from the face of the earth. Manx- 
men have not yet taken the poetry out of the moon 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 131 

and the stars, and the mist of the mountains and 
the wail of the sea. Of course we are ashamed of 
the survival of our old beliefs and try to hide them, 
but let nobody say that as a people we believe no 
longer in charms, and the evil eye, and good 
spirits and bad. I know we do. It would be 
easy to give you a hundred illustrations. I 
remember an ill-tempered old body living on the 
Curragh, who was supposed to possess the evil 
eye. If a cow died at calving, she had witched it. 
If a baby cried suddenly in its sleep, the old witch 
must have been going by on the road. If the 
potatoes were blighted, she had looked over the 
hedge at them. There was a charm doctor in 
Kirk Andreas, named Teare-Ballawhane. He was 
before my time, but I recall many stories of him. 
When a cow was sick of the witching of the woman 
of the Curragh, the farmer fled over to Kirk Andreas 
for the charm of the charm-doctor. From the 
moment Teare-Ballawhane began to boil his herbs 
the cow recovered. If the cow died after all, there 
was some fault in the farmer. I remember a child, 
a girl, who twenty years ago had a birth-mark on 
her face — a broad red stain like a hand on her 
cheek. Not long since, I saw her as a young 



I 3 2 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi 

woman, and the stain was either gone entirely or 
hidden by her florid complexion. When I asked 
what had been done for her, I heard that a good 
woman had charmed her. " Aw, yes," said the 
girl's mother, " a few good words do no harm 
anyway." Not long ago I met an old fellow in 
Onchan village who believed in the Nightman, an 
evil spirit who haunts the mountains at night 
predicting tempests and the doom of ships, the 
dooinney-oie of the Manx, akin to the banshee of the 
Irish. " Aw, man," said he, " it was up Snaefell 
way, and I was coming from Kirk Michael over, 
and it was black dark, and I heard the Nightman 
after me, shoutin' and wailin' morthal, how-la-a, 
how-a-a. But I didn't do nothin', no, and he 
came up to me lek a besom, and went past me 
same as a flood, who-o-o ! And I lerr him! Aw, 
yes, man, yes ! " 

I remember many a story of fairies, some recited 
half in humour, others in grim earnest. One old 
body told me that on the night of her wedding-day, 
coming home from the Curragh, whither she had 
stolen away in pursuit of a belated calf, she was 
chased in the moonlight by a troop of fairies. 
They held on to her gown, and climbed on her back, 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 133 

and perched on her shoulders, and clung to her 
hair. There were " hundreds and tons " of them ; 
they were about as tall as a wooden broth-ladle, 
and all wore cocked-hats and velvet jackets. 

A good fairy long inhabited the Isle of Man. 
He was called in Manx the Phynnodderee. It 
would appear that he had two brothers of like 
features with himself, one in Scotland called the 
Brownie, the other in Scandinavia called the Swart- 
alfar. I have often heard how on a bad night 
the Manx folk would go off to bed early so that 
the Phynnodderee might come in out of the cold. 
Before going upstairs they built up the fire, and set 
the kitchen table with crocks of milk and pecks of 
oaten cake for the entertainment of their guest. 
Then while they slept the Phynnodderee feasted, yet 
he always left the table exactly as he found it, eat- 
ing the cake and drinking the milk, but filling up the 
peck and the crock afresh. Nobody ever intruded 
upon him, so nobody ever saw him, save the Manx 
Peeping Tom. I remember hearing an old Manx- 
man say that his curiosity overcame his reverence, 
and he " leff the wife," stepped out of bed, crept to 
the head of the stairs, and peeped over the banisters 
into the kitchen. There he saw the Phynnodderee 



134 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [uect. m 

sitting in his own arm-chair, with a great company 
of brother and sister fairies about him, baking bread 
on the griddle, and chattering together like linnets 
in spring. But he could not understand a word 
they were saying. 

I have told you that the Manxman is not built 
by nature for a gallant. He has one bad fairy, 
and she is the embodied spirit of a beautiful 
woman. Manx folk-lore, like Manx carvals, Manx 
ballads, and Manx proverbs, takes it for a bad sign 
of a woman's character that she has personal 
beauty. If she is beautiful, ten to one she is a 
witch. That is how it happens that there are so 
many witches in the Isle of Man. 

The story goes that a beautiful wicked witch 
entrapped the men of the island. They would 
follow her anywhere. So she led them into the 
sea, and they were all drowned. Then the women 
of the island went forth to punish her, and, to 
escape from them, she took the form of a wren and 
flew away. That is how it comes about that the 
poor little wren is hunted and killed on St. 
Stephen's Day. The Manx lads do it, though 
surely it ought to be the Manx maidens. At 
midnight they sally forth in great companies, 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 135 

armed with sticks and carrying torches. They 
beat the hedges until they light on a wren's nest, 
and, having started the wren and slaughtered it, 
they suspend the tiny mite to the middle of a long- 
pole, which is borne by two lads from shoulder to 
shoulder. They then sing a rollicking native ditty, 
of which one version runs : — 

We'll hunt the wren, says Robbin the Bobbin ; 
We'll hunt the wren, says Richard the Robbin ; 
We'll hunt the wren, says Jack of the Lan' ; 
We'll hunt the wren, says every one. 

But Robbin the Bobbin and Richard the Robbin 
are not the only creatures who have disappeared 
into the sea. The fairies themselves have also 
gone there. They inhabit Man no more. A 
Wesleyan preacher declared some years ago that 
he witnessed the departure of all the Manx fairies 
from the Bay of Douglas. They went away in empty 
rum puncheons, and scudded before the wind as far 
as the eye could reach, in the direction of Jamaica. 
So we have done with them, both good and bad. 

However, among the witches whom we have left 
to us in remote corners of the island is the very 
harmless one called the Queen of the Mheillia. Her 
rural Majesty is a sort of first cousin of the Queen 



136 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect hi 

of the May. The Mheillia is the harvest-home. 
It is a picturesque ceremonial, observed differently 
in different parts. Women and girls follow the 
reapers to gather and bind the corn after it has 
fallen to the swish of the sickles. A handful of the 
standing corn of the last of the farmer's fields is 
tied about with ribbon. Nobody but the farmer 
knows where that handful is, and the girl who 
comes upon it by chance is made the Queen of the 
Mheillia. She takes it to the highest eminence 
near, and waves it, and her fellow-reapers and 
gleaners shout huzzas. Their voices are heard 
through the valley, where other farmers and other 
reapers and gleaners stop in their work and say, 
" So-and-so's Mheillia ! " " Ballamona's Mheillia's 
took ! " That night the farmer gives a feast in his 
barn to celebrate the getting in of his harvest, and 
the close of the work of the women at the harvest- 
ing. Sheep's heads for a change on Manx 
herrings, English ale for a change on Manx jough ; 
then dancing led by the mistress, to the tune of a 
fiddle, played faster and wilder as the night 
advances, reel and jig, jig and reel. This pretty 
rural festival is still observed, though it has lost 
much of its quaintness. I think I can just remem- 



LECT. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION iV 

ber to have heard the shouts of the Mheillia from 
the breasts of the mountains. 

You will have gathered that in no part of the 
world could you find a more reckless and ill- 
conditioned breeding-ground of suppositions, legends, 
traditions, and superstitions than in the Isle of Man. 
The custom of hunting (he wren is widely spread 
throughout Ireland ; and if I were to tell you of 
Manx wedding customs, Manx burial customs, 
Manx birth customs, May day, Lammas, Good 
Friday, New Year, and Christmas customs, you 
would recognise in the Manxman the same irre- 
sponsible tendency to appropriate whatever flotsam 
drifts to his shore. What I have told you has 
come mainly of my own observation, but for a 
complete picture of Manx manners and customs, 
beliefs and superstitions, I will refer you to William 
Kennish's " Mona's Isle, and other Poems," a rare 
book, with next to no poetic quality, and containing 
much that is worthless, but having a good body of 
real native stuff in it, such as cannot be found 
elsewhere. A still better anthology is likely to be 
soon forthcoming from the pen of Mr. A. W. Moore 
(the excellent editor of " Manx Names ") and the 
press of Mr. Nutt. 



138 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. n , 

It is easy to laugh at these old superstitions, so 
childish do they seem, so foolish, so ignorant. But 
shall we therefore set ourselves so much above 
our fathers because they were slaves to them, and 
we believe them not ? Bethink you. Are we so 
much wiser, after all ? How much farther have we 
got ? We know the mists of Mannanan. They are 
only the vapours from the south, creeping along 
the ridge of our mountains, going north. Is that 
enough to know ? We know the cold eye of the 
evil man, whose mere presence hurts us, and the 
warm eye of the born physician, whose mere 
presence heals us. Does that tell us everything ? 
We hear the moans which the sea sends up to the 
mountains, when storms are coming, and ships are 
to be wrecked, and we do not call them the voices of 
the Nightman, but only the voices of the wind. We 
have changed the name ; but we have taken none 
of the mystery and marvel out of the thing itself. 
It is the Wind for us ; it was the Nightman for 
our fathers. That is nearly all. The wind 
bloweth where it listeth. We are as far off as 
ever. Our superstitions remain, only we call them 
Science, and try not to be afraid of them. But 
we are as little children after all, and the best of us 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 139 

are those that, being wisest, see plainest that, 
before the wonders and terrors of the great world 
we live in, we "are children, walking hand-in-hand 
in fear. 

. Manx Stories 

You will say that there ought to be many good 
stories of a people like the Manx ; and here again I 
have to confess to you that the absence of all 
literary conscience, all perception of keeping and 
relation, all sense of harmony and congruity in the 
Manxman has so demoralised our anecdotal ana 
that I hesitate to offer you certain of the best of 
our Manx yarns from fear that they may be vener- 
able English, Irish, and Scotch familiars. I will 
content myself with a few that bear undoubted 
Manx lineaments. As an instance of Manx hos- 
pitality, simple and rude, but real and hearty, I 
think you would go the world over to match this. 
The late Rev. Hugh Stowell Brown, a Manxman, 
brother of the most famous of living Manxmen, 
and himself our North-country Spurgeon, with his 
wife, his sister, and his mother, were belated one 
evening up Baldwin Glen, and stopped at a farm- 



i 4 o THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. tii 

house to inquire their way. But the farmer would 
not hear of their going a step further. " Aw, non- 
sense ! " he said. " What's the use of talking 
man ? You'll be stoppin' with us to-night. Aw 
'deed ye will, though. The women can get along 
together aisy, and you're a clane lookivC sort o' 
chap; you' 11 be sleepin with me." 

In the old days of, say, two steamboats a week 
to England the old Manx captains of the Steamboat 
Company were notorious soakers. There is a 
story of one of them who had the Archdeacon of 
the island aboard in a storm. It was night. The 
reverend Archdeacon was in an agony of pain and 
terror. He inquired anxiously of the weather. 
The captain, very drunk, answered, " If it doesn't 
mend we'll all be in heaven before morning, Arch- 
deacon ! " " Oh, God forbid, captain," cried the 
Archdeacon. 

I have said what true work for religion Noncon- 
formity must have done in those evil days when the 
clergy of the Athols were more busy with back- 
gammon than with theology. But the religion of 
the old type of Manx Methodist was often an 
amusing mixture of puritanism and its opposite, a 
sort of grim, white-faced sanctity, that was never 



lect. m] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 141 

altogether free of the suspicion of a big boisterous 
laugh behind it. The Methodist local preachers 
have been the real guardians and repositories of one 
side of the Manx genius, a curious, hybrid thing, 
deadly earnest, often howlingly ludicrous, simple, 
generally sincere, here and there audaciously hypo- 
critical. Among local preachers I remember some 
of the sweetest, purest, truest men that ever 
walked this world of God ; but I also remember a 
man who was brought home from market on 
Saturday night, dead drunk, across the bottom of 
his cart drawn by his faithful horse, and I saw him 
in the pulpit next morning, and heard his sermon 
on the evils of backsliding. There is a story of the 
jealousy of two local preachers. The one went to 
hear the other preach. The preacher laid out his 
subject under a great many heads, firstly, secondly, 
thirdly, up to tenthly. His rival down below in 
the pew spat and hawd and tchttt'd a good deal, 
and at last, quite impatient of getting no solid reli- 
gious food, cried aloud, " Give us mate, man, give 
us mate ! " Whereupon the preacher leaned over 
the pulpit cushion, and said, " Hould on, man, till 
I've done with the carving." 

But to tell of Happy Dan, and his wondrous 



142 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. in 

sermon on the Prodigal Son at the Clover Stones, 
Lonan, and his discourse on the swine possessed of 
devils who went " triddle-traddle, triddle-traddle 
down the brews and were clane drownded ; " and of 
the marvellous account of how King David remon- 
strated in broadest Manx patois with the " pozzle-tree " 
for being blown down ; and then of the grim 
earnestness of a good man who could never preach 
on a certain text without getting wet through to the 
waistcoat with perspiration — to open the flood-gates of 
this kind of Manx story would be to liberate a reservoir 
that would hardly know an end, so I must spare you. 

Manx "Characters" 

At various points of my narrative I have touched 
on certain of our eccentric Manx " characters." 
But perhaps more interesting than any such whom 
I have myself met with are some whom I have 
known only by repute. These children of Nature 
are after all the truest touchstones of a nation's 
genius. Crooked, distorted, deformed, they never- 
theless, and perhaps therefore, show clearly the 
bent of their race. If you are without brake or 
curb you may be blind, but you must know when 



lect. m] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 143 

you are going down hill. The curb of education, and 
the brake of common-sense are the surest checks 
on a people's individuality. And these poor half- 
wits of the Manx race, wiser withal than many of 
the Malvolios who smile on them so demurely, 
exhibit the two great racial qualities of the Manx 
people — the Celtic and the Norse — in vivid com- 
panionship and contrast. It is an amusing fact 
that in some wild way the bardic spirit breaks out 
in all of them. They are all singers, either of 
their own songs, or the songs of others. That 
surely is the Celtic strain in them. But their 
songs are never of the joys of earth or of love, or yet 
of war ; never, like the rustic poetry of the Scotch, 
full of pawky humour ; never cynical, never sar- 
castic ; only concerned with the terrors of judgment 
and damnation and the place of torment. That, 
also, may be a fierce and dark development of the 
Celtic strain, but I see more of the Norse spirit in 
it. When my ancient bard in Glen Rushen took 
down his thumb-marked, greasy, discoloured poems 
from the "lath" against the open-timbered ceiling, 
and read them aloud to me in his broad Manx 
dialect, with a sing-song of voice and a swinging 
motion of body, while the loud hailstorm pelted the 



144 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi 

window pane and the wind whistled round the 
house, I found they were all startling and almost 
ghastly appeals to the sinner to shun his evil 
courses. One of them ran like this : 

HELL IS HOT. 

O sinner, see your dangerous state, 

And think of hell ere 'tis too late ; 

When worldly cares would drown each thought, 

Pray call to mind that hell is hot. 

Still to increase your godly fears, 

Let this be sounding in your ears, 

Still bear in mind that hell is hot, 

Remember and forget it not. 

There was another poem about a congregation of the 
dead in the region of the damned : 

I found a reverend parson there, 

A congregation too, 
Bowed on their bended knees at prayer, 

As they were wont to do. 
But soon my heart was struck with pain, 

I thought it truly odd, 
The parson's prayer did not contain 

A word concerning God. 

You will remember the Danish book called " Letters 
from Hell," containing exactly the same idea, and 
conclude that the Manx bard was poking fun at 
some fashionable yet worldly-minded preacher. But 
no ; he was too much a child of Nature for that. 



lect. m] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 145 

There is not much satire in the Manx character, 
and next to no cynicism at all. The true Manxman 
is white-hot. I have heard of one, John Gale, 
called the Manx Burns, who lampooned the upstarts 
about him, and also of one, Tom the Dipper, an 
itinerant Manx bard, who sang at fairs ; but in a 
general way the Manx bard has been a deadly 
earnest person, most at home in churchyards. 
There was one such, akin in character to my old 
friend Billy of Maughold, but of more universal 
popularity, a quite privileged pet of everybody, a 
sort of sacred being, though as crazy as man may 
be, called Chalse-a-Killey. Chaise was scarcely a 
bard, but a singer of the songs of bards. He was 
a religious monomaniac, who lived before his time, 
poor fellow ; his madness would not be seen in him 
now. The idol of his crazed heart was Bishop 
Wilson. He called him dear and sweet, vowed he 
longed to die, just that he might meet him in heaven, 
then Wilson would take him by the hand, and lie 
would tell him all his mind, and together they 
would set up a printing press, with the types of 
diamonds, and print hymns, and send them back 10 
the Isle of Man. Poor, 'wildered brain, haunted by 
" half-born thoughts," not all delusions, but quaint 

K 



146 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi 

and grotesque. Full of valiant fury, Chaise was 
always ready to fight for his distorted phantom of 
the right. When an uncle of my own died, whose 
name I bear, Chaise shocked all the proprieties by 
announcing his intention of walking in front of the 
funeral procession through the streets and singing 
his terrible hymns. He would yield to no persua- 
sion, no appeals, and no threats. He had promised 
the dead man that he would do this, and he would 
not break his oath to save his life. It was agony 
to the mourners, but they had to submit. Chaise 
fulfilled bis vow, walked ten yards in front, sang 
his fierce music with the tears streaming from 
his wild eyes down his quivering face. But the 
spectacle let loose no unseemly mirth. Nobody 
laughed, and surely if the heaven that Chaise feared 
was listening and looking down, his crazy voice was 
not the last to pierce the dome of it. My friend the 
Rev. T. E. Brown has written a touching and 
beautiful poem, " To Chaise in Heaven " : 

So you are gone, dear Chaise ! 

Ah well ; it was enough — 

The ways were cold, the ways were rough. 

O Heaven ! O home ! 

No more to roam, 

Chaise, poor Chaise ! 
And now it's all so plain, dear Chaise ! 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 147 

So plain — 

The 'wildered brain, 

The joy, the pain 
The phantom shapes that haunted, 
The half-bom thoughts that daunted % 

All, all is plain, 
Dear Chaise ! 

All is plain. 
* * * # * -:;- 

Ah now, dear Chaise ! of all die radiant host, 
Who loves you most ? 

I think I know him, kneeling on his knees ; 
Is it Saint Francis of Assise ? 

Chaise, poor Chaise. 



Manx Characteristics 

I have rambled on too long about my eccentric 
Manx characters, and left myself little space 
for a summary of the soberer Manx character- 
istics. These are independence, modesty, a degree 
of sloth, a non-sanguine temperament, pride, and 
some covetousness. This uncanny combination of 
characteristics is perhaps due to our mixed Celtic 
and Norse blood. Our independence is pure 
Norse. I have never met the like of it, except in 
Norway, where a Bergen policeman who had hunted 
all the morning for my lost umbrella would not take 
anything for his pains ; and in Iceland, where a 



148 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. m 

poor old woman in a ragged woollen dress, a torn hufa 
on her head, torn skin shoes on her feet, and with 
rheumatism playing visible havoc all over her body, 
refused a kroner with the dignity, grave look, 
stiffened lips, and proud head that would have 
become a duchess. But the Manxman's indepen- 
dence almost reaches a vice. He is so unwilling to 
owe anything to any man that he is apt to become 
self-centred and cold, and to lose one of the 
sweetest joys of life — that of receiving great favours 
from those we greatly love, between whom and 
ourselves there is no such thing as an obligation, 
and no such thing as a debt. There is something 
in the Manxman's blood that makes him hate rank ; 
and though he has a vast respect for wealth, it 
must be his own, for he will take off his hat to 
nobody else's. 

The modesty of the Manxman reaches shyness, 
and his shyness is capable of making him downright 
rude. One of my friends tells a charming story, 
very characteristic of our people, of a conversation 
with the men of the herring- fleet. " We were 
comin' home from the Shetland fishing, ten boats 
of us ; and we come to an anchor in a bay. And 
there was a tremenjis fine castle there, and a 



lect. 1:1] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 149 

ter'ble great lady. Aw, she was a ter'ble kind 
lady; she axed the lot of us (eighty men and boys, 
eight to each boat) to come up and have dinner 
with her. So the day come — well, none of us 
went ! That shy ! " My friend reproved them 
soundly, and said he wished he knew who the lady 
was that he might write to her and apologise. Then 
followed a long story of how a breeze sprung up 
and eight of the boats sailed. After that the crew 
of the remaining two boats, sixteen men and boys, 
went up to the tremenjis great castle, and the 
ter'ble great lady, and had tea. If any lady here 
present knows a lady on the north-west coast of 
Scotland who a year or two back invited eighty Manx 
men and boys to dinner, and received sixteen to 
tea, she will redeem the character of our race if she 
will explain that it was not because her hospitality 
was not appreciated that it was not accepted by our 
foolish countrymen. 

There is nothing that more broadly indicates the 
Norse strain in the Manx character than the non- 
sanguine temperament of the Manxmen. Where 
the pure Celt will hope anything and promise 
everything, the Manxman will hope not at all and 
promise nothing. " Middling " is the commonest 



150 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi 

word in a Manxman's mouth. Hardly anything is 
entirely good, or wholly bad, but nearly everything 
is middling. It's a middling fine day, or a middling 
stormy one ; the sea is middling smooth or middling 
rough ; the herring harvest is middling big or 
middling little ; a man is never much more than 
middling tired, or middling well, or middling hungry, 
or middling thirsty, and the place you are travelling 
to is always middling near or middling far. The true 
Manxman commits himself to nothing. When Nelson 
was shot down at Trafalgar, Cowle, a one-armed 
Manx quartermaster, caught him in his remaining 
arm. This was Cowle 's story : " He fell right into my 
arms, sir. 'Mr. Cowle,' he says, 'do you think I shall 
recover ? ' 'I think, my lord,' I says, ' we had better 
wait for the opinion of the medical man.' " Dear 
old Cowle, that cautious word showed you were 
no Irishman, but a downright middling Manxman. 

I have one more story to tell, and that is of 
Manx pride, which is a wondrous thing, usually 
very ludicrous. A young farming girl who will go 
about barefoot throughout the workdays of the week 
would rather perish than not dress in grand attire, 
after her own sort, on Sunday afternoon. But 
Manx pride in dress can be very touching and 



user, si] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 151 

human. When the lighthouse was built on the 
Chickens Rock, the men who were to live in it were 
transferred from two old lighthouses on the little 
islet called the Calf of Man, but their families were 
left in the disused lighthouses. Thus the men 
were parted from their wives and children, but each 
could see the house of the other, and on Sunday 
mornings the wives in their old lighthouses always 
washed and dressed the children and made them 
" nice " and paraded them to and fro on the 
platforms in front of the doors, and the men 
in their new lighthouse always looked across the 
Sound at their little ones through their powerful 
telescopes. 

Manx Types 

Surely that is a lovely story, full of real sweet- 
ness and pathos. It reminds me that amid many 
half-types of dubious quality, selfish, covetous, 
quarrelsome, litigious, there are at least two types 
of Manx character entirely charming and delightful. 
The one is the best type of Manx seaman, a true 
son of the sea, full of wise saws and proverbs, full 
of long yarns and wondrous adventures, up to any- 



152 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. hi 

thing, down to anything, pragmatical, a mighty 
moralist in his way, but none the less equal to a 
round ringing oath ; a sapient adviser putting on 
the airs of a philosopher, but as simple as the baby 
of a girl — in a word, dear old Tom Baynes of 
" Fo'c's'le Yarns," old salt, old friend, old rip. The 
other type is that of the Manx parish patriarch. 
This good soul it would be hard to beat among all 
the peoples of earth. He unites the best qualities 
of both sexes ; he is as soft and gentle as a dear 
old woman, and as firm of purpose as a strong man. 
Garrulous, full of platitudes, easily moved to tears 
by a story of sorrow and as easily taken in, but 
beloved and trusted and reverenced by all the little 
world about him. I have known him as a farmer, 
and seen him sitting at the head of his table in the 
farm kitchen, with his sons and daughters and men- 
servants and women-servants about him, and, save 
for ribald gossip, no one of whatever condition 
abridged the flow of talk for his presence. I have 
known him as a parson, when he has been the 
father of his parish, the patriarch of his people, the 
" ould angel " of all the hillside round about. Such 
sweetness in his home life, such nobility, such 
gentle, old-fashioned ceremoniousness, such delight- 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 153 

ful simplicity of manners. Then when two of 
these " ould angels " met, two of these Parson 
Adamses, living in content on seventy pounds a 
year, such high talk on great themes, long hour 
after long hour in the little low-ceiled Vicarage 
study, with no light but the wood fire, which glistened 
on the diamond window-pane ! And when mid- 
night came seeing each other home, spending half 
the night walking to and fro from Vicarage to 
Vicarage, or turning out to saddle the horse in the 
field, but (far away " in wandering mazes lost ") 
going blandly up to the old cow and putting on the 
blinkers and saying, " Here he is, sir." Have we 
anything like all this in England ? Their type is 
nearly extinct even in the Isle of Man, where they 
have longest survived. And indeed they are not 
the only good things that are dying out there. 



Literary Associations 

The island has next to no literary associations, 
but it would be unpardonable in a man of letters if 
he were to forget the few it can boast. Joseph 
Train, our historian, made the acquaintance of 



154 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. m 

Scott in 1 8 14, and during the eighteen years 
following he rendered important services to " The 
Great Unknown " as a collector of some of the 
legendary stories used as foundations for what were 
then called the Scotch Novels. But it is a common 
error that Train found the groundwork of the 
Manx part of " Peveril of the Peak." It was Scott 
who directed Train to the Isle of Man as a fine 
subject for study. Scott's brother Thomas lived 
there, and no doubt this was the origin of Scott's 
interest in the island. Scott himself never set 
foot on it. Wordsworth visited the island about 
1823, and he recorded his impressions in various 
sonnets, and also in the magnificent lines on Peel 
Castle — " I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged 
pile." He also had a relative living there — Miss 
Hutchinson, his sister-in-law. A brother of this 
lady, a mariner, lies buried in Braddan churchyard, 
and his tombstone bears an epitaph which Words- 
worth indited. The poet spent a summer at Peel, 
pitching his tent above what is now called Peveril 
Terrace. One of my friends tried long ago to pump 
up from this sapless soil some memory of Words- 
worth, but no one could remember anything about 
him. Shelley is another poet of whom there 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 155 

remains no trace in the Isle of Man. He visited 
the island early in 18 12, being driven into Douglas 
harbour by contrary winds on his voyage from 
Cumberland to Ireland. He was then almost un- 
known; Harriet was still with him, and his head 
was full of political reforms. The island was in a 
state of some turmoil, owing to the unpopularity of 
the Athols, who still held manorial rights and the 
patronage of the Bishopric. The old Norse Con- 
stitution was intact, and the House of Keys was 
then a self-elected chamber. It is not wonderful 
that Shelley made no impression on Man in 18 12, 
but it is surprising that Man seems to have made 
no impression on Shelley. It made a very sensible 
impression on Hawthorne, who left his record in the 
" English Note Book." 



Manx Progress 

I am partly conscious that throughout these 
lectures I have kept my face towards the past. That 
has been because I have been loth to look at the 
present, and almost afraid to peep into the future. 
The Isle of Man is not now what it was even five- 



156 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. m 

and-twenty years ago. It has become too English 
of late. The change has been sudden. Quite 
within my own recollection England seemed so far 
away that there was something beyond conception 
moving and impressive in the effect of it and its 
people upon the imagination of the Manx. There 
were only about two steamers a week between 
England and the Isle of Man at that time. Now 
there are about two a da}-. There are lines of 
railway on this little plot of land, which you might 
cross on foot between breakfast and lunch, and 
cover from end to end in a good day's walk. 
This is, of course, a necessity of the altered 
conditions, as also, no doubt, are the parades, and 
esplanades, and promenades, and iron piers, and 
marine carriage drives, and Eiffel Tower, and old 
castles turned into Vauxhall Gardens, and fairy 
glens into " happy day " Roshervilles. God forbid 
that I should grudge the factory hand his breath of 
the sea and glimpse of the gorse-bushes ; but I 
know what price we are paying that we may 
entertain him. 

Our young Manxman is already feeling the Eng- 
lish immigration on his character. He is not as 
good a man as his father was before him. I dare 



lect. m] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 157 

say that in his desire to make everything English 
that is Manx, he may some day try to abolish the 
House of Keys, or at least dig up the Tynwald 
Hill. In one fit of intermittent mania, he has 
already attempted to " restore " the grand ruins 
of Peel Castle, getting stones from Whitehaven, 
filling up loop-holes, and doing other indecencies 
with the great works of the dead. All this could 
be understood if the young Manxman were likely 
to be much the richer for the changes he is bringing 
about. But he is not ; the money that comes 
from England is largely taken by English people, 
and comes back to England. 



Conclusion 

From these ungracious thoughts let me turn 
again, in a last word, to the old island itself, the 
true Mannin-veg-Veen of the real Manxman. In 
these lectures you have seen it only as m flashes from 
a dark lantern. I am conscious that an historian 
would have told you so much more of solid fact 
that you might have carried away tangible ideas. 
Fact is not my domain, and I shall have to be 



158 THE LITTLE MANX NATION [lect. in 

content if in default of it I have got you close to 
that less palpable thing, the living heart of Manx- 
land, shown you our island, helped you to see its 
blue waters and to scent its golden gorse, and to 
know the Manxman from other men. Sometimes 
I have been half ashamed to ask you to look at 
our countrymen, so rude are they and so 
primitive — russet-coated, currane-shod men and 
women, untaught, superstitious, fishing the sea, 
tilling their stony land, playing next to no part 
in the world, and only gazing out on it as a mys- 
tery far away, whereof the rumour comes over the 
great waters. No great man among us, no great 
event in our history, nothing to make us memorable. 
But I have been re-assured when I have remem- 
bered that, after all, to look on a life so simple and 
natural might even be a tonic. Here we are in 
the heart of the mighty world, which the true 
Manxman knows only by vague report ; millions on 
millions huddled together, enough to make five 
hundred Isles of Man, more than all the Manxmen 
that have lived since the days of Orry, more than 
all that now walk on the island, added to all that 
rest under it ; streets on streets of us, parks on 
parks, living a life that has no touch of Nature in 



lect. in] THE LITTLE MANX NATION 159 

the ways of it ; save only in our own breasts, which 
often rebel against our surroundings, struggling 
with weariness under their artificiality, and the wild 
travesty of what we are made for. Do what we 
will, and be what we may, sometimes we feel the 
falseness of our ways of life, and surely it is then a 
good and wholesome thing to go back in thought to 
such children of Nature as my homespun Manx 
people, and see them where Nature placed them, 
breathing the free air of God's proper world, and 
living the right lives of His servants, though so 
simple, poor, and rude. 



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